I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
R6 and R2 are becoming increasingly similar. It's probably just a reflection of my tastes, but I would like 6 Music to be a *bit* weirder and a bit less cosy with its core demo of Britpop Dads.
I quite like the weirdness too. I'd quite like every other song to be something I haven't heard before. My favourite shows are Marc Riley and Gideon Coe - which still have the weirdness. Had, anyway. Being f*cked about with, naturally.
I used to like Shaun Keaveney. Not particularly challenging musically, but a good start to the day. Lauren Laverne - his replacement - is like listening to a hen night with the odd intrusion of 1Xtra (surely the point of 1Xtra is that the rest of us shouldn't have to listen to that sort of thing?) I suspect Shaun Keaveney was a victim of BBC Radio feeling it needed to rejig its gender balance a bit.
My alternative is XS Manchester (or XFM) - but that is pure Britpop dads, and nothing at all you haven't heard before. And you'll never get Half Man Half Biscuit or the Fall. But the wife likes listening to music she knows and there's rarely anything on there that I hate.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
I would still have some serious doubts about that, myself.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
There is a slightly odd aspect to how they cover this music too. When they cover painting it might be Vermeer or Rego; it will at least involve real talent and articulate comment. When they cover music is tends to be popular commercial trash to which (I suspect) a high % of their listeners are actively averse.
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, that’s exactly what they should be doing. More hard news, investigative journalism, and interviews. Less opinion, lowbrow culture, and “issues”.
90% of radio programming would just as likely be made by commercial stations. The BBC needs to concentrate on the other 10%. How many listeners have they lost to Times Radio on DAB?
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
We’re either Greatest Hits or Virgin Radio now when we’re driving.
Radio 2 I cannot really be doing with now. The music is just not for me.
The BBC can do what it wants and abandon a large demographic if it wants, even if they are liecense fee payers, to cater for a younger or more Niche audience. But that demographic will go elsewhere.
Spotify is also a godsend.
As for R4 being a govt mouthpiece that is absurd.
I am BBC Sounds on Android Auto.. currently listening to Paul Temple....
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
In other words - no criticism of any commercial company can ever be justified, "because the market".
No, not at all. But criticism, and the restriction of profits from what you have sold have real world consequences. With windfall taxes and other interference in the market by government we make the UK a less attractive place for foreigners to invest and we need their money for as long as we overspend.
We don't need to restrict profits, we need to enforce laws.
There should be huge fines for water companies that dump sewage beyond whatever the agreed threshold is. If that means they face losses due to previous underinvestment, then so be it. And they should continue to be fined until they invest to meet their obligations.
If that is unaffordable, then the equity holders can get wiped out and the debt holders can take control of the company and have another go.
That's how the market is supposed to work, particularly for highly regulated local monopolies.
There should be.
But what is the agreed threshold? Has that actually been happening?
We are using far more water than we were pre-privatisation, and far less is being dumped as sewerage into waterways than was happening pre-privatisation.
Discharges into waterways are part of how the system has worked since it was created in the Victorian era onwards. If we want to eliminate that, that will require a change in thresholds and investment to go with that accordingly.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
As with nearly everything, the mentality of the specifiers of the system is the important criteria.
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?
A decade ago in a previous life, I dealt with a utility company which estimated that each customer interaction via their website rather than call centre saved £75. True or not, if managements believe it then you can see why customer service chatbots are ubiquitous.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
If you reach a bot press # to every question and if that fails, say "I want to talk to a human being" So far that has worked, but with AI... who knows.....
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
I would still have some serious doubts about that, myself.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
Its only gone into reverse if the number goes negative. Any positive number is adding on top of what came before.
The change in number is a second-order derivative. Eg if you accelerate onto a motorway and do 70mph then that is your speed. If you then add another 20mph you're now doing 90. If you then add another 15mph, then another 10mph, then another 5mph then what speed are you going? Is it safe, is it slower than it was before?
Also the chart ends at 2018. Apparently the number for the past 12 months looks like being about 700k according to reports, so will be even higher than then - and again its on top of everyone added then.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
Since the "blob" has become a silly term - something like an "Overton window" in public administration?
It's worth recognising that while the *appearance* of not being racist is all important, the actual reality seems to be less so. Hence the Met Police spending vast sums on courses, credentials etc at the same time as stopping people for Driving While Black.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
Nah, not the name. Campaigns backing themselves indirectly most likely.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
There is a slightly odd aspect to how they cover this music too. When they cover painting it might be Vermeer or Rego; it will at least involve real talent and articulate comment. When they cover music is tends to be popular commercial trash to which (I suspect) a high % of their listeners are actively averse.
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, that’s exactly what they should be doing. More hard news, investigative journalism, and interviews. Less opinion, lowbrow culture, and “issues”.
Yes. Though there is opinion and opinion. The informed opinions and considered judgements of the best are well worth having, and more use than obfuscating self serving politicians. The sharing of mutual ignorance (a Radio 5 speciality) and people who want to 'raise awareness', especially those who have 'started a charity' are the worst.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
I would still have some serious doubts about that, myself.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
Its only gone into reverse if the number goes negative. Any positive number is adding on top of what came before.
The change in number is a second-order derivative. Eg if you accelerate onto a motorway and do 70mph then that is your speed. If you then add another 20mph you're now doing 90. If you then add another 15mph, then another 10mph, then another 5mph then what speed are you going? Is it safe, is it slower than it was before?
Also the chart ends at 2018. Apparently the number for the past 12 months looks like being about 700k according to reports, so will be even higher than then - and again its on top of everyone added then.
At the very least, the process has changed, over exactly the same period that a ( large and significant ) other input has appeared - which is also identically the period where complaints have risen.
That makes it pretty likely that it's not the primary cause, I would say there.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
As with nearly everything, the mentality of the specifiers of the system is the important criteria.
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?
A decade ago in a previous life, I dealt with a utility company which estimated that each customer interaction via their website rather than call centre saved £75. True or not, if managements believe it then you can see why customer service chatbots are ubiquitous.
Extraordinary. Were they employing Jimmy Carr at the call centre to insult everyone who phoned up perhaps?
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
Antivaxer too. Hardly an asset. Re the betting, although one doesn't want to think about No Joe it's interesting to ponder where that might lead.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
Since the "blob" has become a silly term - something like an "Overton window" in public administration?
It's worth recognising that while the *appearance* of not being racist is all important, the actual reality seems to be less so. Hence the Met Police spending vast sums on courses, credentials etc at the same time as stopping people for Driving While Black.
Up to £895M up for grabs in UK Emergency Services procurement Here we go again: Next piece in troubled ESN upgrade
The UK’s Home Office has put up to £895 million on offer in the search for a tech supplier to provide “user services” for the Emergency Services Network, a controversial public sector project that is delayed by more than five years and over-spent by billions of pounds.
The ESN has long been intended to replace Airwave, the UK’s current radio communications system for ambulance, fire services and police which offers very limited data services.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
Antivaxer too. Hardly an asset. Re the betting, although one doesn't want to think about No Joe it's interesting to ponder where that might lead.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
There is a slightly odd aspect to how they cover this music too. When they cover painting it might be Vermeer or Rego; it will at least involve real talent and articulate comment. When they cover music is tends to be popular commercial trash to which (I suspect) a high % of their listeners are actively averse.
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, that’s exactly what they should be doing. More hard news, investigative journalism, and interviews. Less opinion, lowbrow culture, and “issues”.
90% of radio programming would just as likely be made by commercial stations. The BBC needs to concentrate on the other 10%. How many listeners have they lost to Times Radio on DAB?
One explanation for the poor quality of popular music on the BBC, and many other broadcasters, is that the selection is usually picked by algorithms.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
Antivaxer too. Hardly an asset. Re the betting, although one doesn't want to think about No Joe it's interesting to ponder where that might lead.
Kamala Harris.
Yes, she is huge value I think in the market. Far more than an ~2% chance that Betfair reckons at the moment.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
You can call it what you want but this is first level automation removing jobs. Fast food outlets have done a similar thing on removing order takers and replacing them by terminals. And it will accelerate. This is good news as it increases productivity and that is something the UK needs. On the other hand is reiterates the question why do we need mass immigration ?
Note that most of the job losses are because BT has been a very badly run business, which is going to lose a significant amount of its legacy business, and is substantially overstaffed.
Certainly AI will impact jobs, but it's hard to draw general conclusions from the particular case.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
I would still have some serious doubts about that, myself.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
Its only gone into reverse if the number goes negative. Any positive number is adding on top of what came before.
The change in number is a second-order derivative. Eg if you accelerate onto a motorway and do 70mph then that is your speed. If you then add another 20mph you're now doing 90. If you then add another 15mph, then another 10mph, then another 5mph then what speed are you going? Is it safe, is it slower than it was before?
Also the chart ends at 2018. Apparently the number for the past 12 months looks like being about 700k according to reports, so will be even higher than then - and again its on top of everyone added then.
At the very least, the process has changed, over exactly the same period that a ( large and significant ) other input has appeared - which is also identically the period where complaints have risen.
That makes it pretty likely that it's not the primary cause, I would say there.
Complaints have risen partially because its politically motivated. This has reached the news, meaning people pay attention to it, so that people complain more.
When it comes to the actual number of discharges, they're far below what they were pre-privatisation.
Standards and expectations are rising and that's a good thing. But there's no reason we shouldn't have even higher standards in the future.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
There is a slightly odd aspect to how they cover this music too. When they cover painting it might be Vermeer or Rego; it will at least involve real talent and articulate comment. When they cover music is tends to be popular commercial trash to which (I suspect) a high % of their listeners are actively averse.
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, that’s exactly what they should be doing. More hard news, investigative journalism, and interviews. Less opinion, lowbrow culture, and “issues”.
90% of radio programming would just as likely be made by commercial stations. The BBC needs to concentrate on the other 10%. How many listeners have they lost to Times Radio on DAB?
R5 used to be pretty good, too. Now, with the odd exception, it seriously dumbed down. And god, the mind numbing tedium of most of the afternoon shows.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
As with nearly everything, the mentality of the specifiers of the system is the important criteria.
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?
Indeed. It's significant also with this firm that if there is (as there will be sooner or later) a corked or otherwise dud bottle, they don't argue about refunding the cost plus a bit extra as a credit note.
Interesting thread on a Russian unit that may soon be involved in the Battle for Bakhmut. A battle that may be about to rapidly deteriorate for the Russians.
NLwartracker @NLwartracker 1/6 Elements of the 10th Tank regiment part of the newly formed 3rd 🇷🇺 army corps, arrived around 13th of may in the area of the town of Odradivka (48.494300,38.014800). They had previously been deployed near Avdiivka, were they were involved a multiple failed frontal assaults
...
NLwartracker @NLwartracker 6/6 🇺🇦 forces are moving slowly as not to overstretch their lines on both sides of Bakhmut, so next weeks will be crucial to the fate of Russian/Wagner sources inside the city, if 🇺🇦 can move beyond the T0513, things are starting to look grim for these forces.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
As with nearly everything, the mentality of the specifiers of the system is the important criteria.
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?
Indeed. It's significant also with this firm that if there is (as there will be sooner or later) a corked or otherwise dud bottle, they don't argue about refunding the cost plus a bit extra as a credit note.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
You can call it what you want but this is first level automation removing jobs. Fast food outlets have done a similar thing on removing order takers and replacing them by terminals. And it will accelerate. This is good news as it increases productivity and that is something the UK needs. On the other hand is reiterates the question why do we need mass immigration ?
Note that most of the job losses are because BT has been a very badly run business, which is going to lose a significant amount of its legacy business, and is substantially overstaffed.
Certainly AI will impact jobs, but it's hard to draw general conclusions from the particular case.
The end of land lines seems have caught them by surprise. The fibre rollouts....
Contrary to what is often claimed, the growth in support for Alliance is not evidence of a growth in centre-ground politics. Alliance has gained votes at the expense of SDLP and UUP and Greens, the other centre-ground parties.
Sinn Fein will probably win close to 30%, and between them, DUP and TUV win slightly more than 30%.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
Antivaxer too. Hardly an asset. Re the betting, although one doesn't want to think about No Joe it's interesting to ponder where that might lead.
Kamala Harris.
Yes, she is huge value I think in the market. Far more than an ~2% chance that Betfair reckons at the moment.
It's nuts that Kari Lake is joint favourite for the Republican VP slot. Though given the current state of the GOP, I'm not inclined to lay the bet for now.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
I would still have some serious doubts about that, myself.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
Its only gone into reverse if the number goes negative. Any positive number is adding on top of what came before.
The change in number is a second-order derivative. Eg if you accelerate onto a motorway and do 70mph then that is your speed. If you then add another 20mph you're now doing 90. If you then add another 15mph, then another 10mph, then another 5mph then what speed are you going? Is it safe, is it slower than it was before?
Also the chart ends at 2018. Apparently the number for the past 12 months looks like being about 700k according to reports, so will be even higher than then - and again its on top of everyone added then.
At the very least, the process has changed, over exactly the same period that a ( large and significant ) other input has appeared - which is also identically the period where complaints have risen.
That makes it pretty likely that it's not the primary cause, I would say there.
Complaints have risen partially because its politically motivated. This has reached the news, meaning people pay attention to it, so that people complain more.
When it comes to the actual number of discharges, they're far below what they were pre-privatisation.
Standards and expectations are rising and that's a good thing. But there's no reason we shouldn't have even higher standards in the future.
I will try and dig out all the old links later if free, but it's only a been top-line issue for about two years, since Monbiot started crusading on it, basically, and getting documentary film-makers and local organisations involved.
The rise in complaints, though, started about five years ago, from what I recall. As mentioned, I'll try and dig out some of the older articles and links I've seen later on, on this, if still having a quieter day.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
R6 and R2 are becoming increasingly similar. It's probably just a reflection of my tastes, but I would like 6 Music to be a *bit* weirder and a bit less cosy with its core demo of Britpop Dads.
I quite like the weirdness too. I'd quite like every other song to be something I haven't heard before. My favourite shows are Marc Riley and Gideon Coe - which still have the weirdness. Had, anyway. Being f*cked about with, naturally.
I used to like Shaun Keaveney. Not particularly challenging musically, but a good start to the day. Lauren Laverne - his replacement - is like listening to a hen night with the odd intrusion of 1Xtra (surely the point of 1Xtra is that the rest of us shouldn't have to listen to that sort of thing?) I suspect Shaun Keaveney was a victim of BBC Radio feeling it needed to rejig its gender balance a bit.
My alternative is XS Manchester (or XFM) - but that is pure Britpop dads, and nothing at all you haven't heard before. And you'll never get Half Man Half Biscuit or the Fall. But the wife likes listening to music she knows and there's rarely anything on there that I hate.
Lauren Laverne isn't my cup of tea either. I didn't mind Keaveney but my wife couldn't stand his style (which I get tbf).
I get more from occasional forays to Piccadilly Records on my lunch break (and their brilliant end-of-year breakdowns do a lot of work for the lazy listeners like me).
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have laid Kennedy. Silly price. People are backing the name, I suppose. Still resonates after all these years.
This particular Kennedy seems to be on the Gabbard wing of the Democrats too - no chance in a primary.
Antivaxer too. Hardly an asset. Re the betting, although one doesn't want to think about No Joe it's interesting to ponder where that might lead.
Kamala Harris.
Is the default. Yet is longer for Next President than Michelle Obama. Bit bizarre on the face of it.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
In what universe has Germany got higher population growth than the UK?
Population of Germany in 2000: 82.21 mn Population of Germany in 2021: 83.20 mn Net change: 0.99mn Percentage change: 1.19%
Population of the UK in 2000: 58.89mn Population of the UK in 2021: 67.33mn Net change: 8.44mn Percentage change: 14.33%
Slight difference there in the percentages. Only a whole order of magnitude and then some off.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Guess when it was easiest for ordinary people to afford to buy properties? 1970s and 1980s. Seems like a correlation.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Guess when it was easiest for ordinary people to afford to buy properties? 1970s and 1980s. Seems like a correlation.
The *system" - planning & running the country - was set for a mode of modest population growth, almost by accident. The various planning laws, for example, kind of accreted.
We need to switch to a mode where infrastructure is based around a 0.5% increase (to pick a number out of hat). This is a long way from steady state.
The other day, someone here protested that building x hundred thousand homes would "change the character of the country".
The character of the country is, in large measure, formed by the people living in it.
The character of the country has already changed.
In times past, building one more house every other year in every village of a hundred homes would have been seen as a bit of growth.
Cornwall, for instance, could add a few house to every hamlet and add 25K homes to the 250K that already exists.
People and their infrastructure are to be celebrated, not treated as toxic waste.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
Yes, Germany has consistently had much higher emigration than the UK, so net migration is higher in the UK.
Also Germany has consistently had much, much lower birth rates too than the UK.
All up, it means far more population growth in the UK than Germany. Far, far more - and that wouldn't be an issue but we've not had the construction growth to match it.
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022, whereas the UK population has increased by around half that, at around 12 million or so, over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in, more than are being replaced.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
There was a thing called reunification between those two dates.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Guess when it was easiest for ordinary people to afford to buy properties? 1970s and 1980s. Seems like a correlation.
Again, there is some connection, but it's also very, and much too simple, to blame immigration for everything.
Thatcherite policies were specifically concentrated around a property and finance economy.
CNN's Licht has abandoned all credibility. He continues to defend the absurd Trump event - and then goes on to say that they'll make sure no one else is allowed the same softball treatment.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/18/media/christiane-amanpour-trump-town-hall-reliable-sources/index.html ...Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, disclosed that she had met with CNN boss Chris Licht this week and that the two “had a very robust exchange of views” about the matter. She said that Licht “welcomed that exchange of views,” but stood by his decision to hold the town hall. Licht told staffers the morning after the event that he believed it was worthwhile because it woke people up to the stakes of the 2024 election.
After hearing out Licht, Amanpour told the Columbia Journalism School graduates that she had not been moved.
“I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format,” the veteran anchor said, contending that the American people had demonstrated with their votes in the last three elections that they are well aware of his behavior.
“I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’ but then that’s me,” Amanpour candidly added, recounting the moment when Trump lashed out at moderator Kaitlan Collins for asking a question that he did not like.
Inside CNN, Amanpour is far from alone in her views. In private, the town hall has been widely criticized by employees at all levels across the organization. Some of these employees believe that Trump wasn’t worthy of a town hall platform after leading the insurrection on the US Capitol and continuing to spew dangerous lies about the 2020 election. Others believe that it was a worthy endeavor to confront him, but that the event was poorly executed....
...The award-winning anchor also described the raucous town hall audience — which cheered Trump on as he mocked sexual abuse claims — as part of the problem. It was CNN’s venue, she contended, and should not have allowed for the jeering and cheering.
Licht conceded to her “the execution” of the town hall “was lacking a little,” she said, and he assured her that “we will not witness that same appalling behavior in future town halls.”..
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the West german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
It had an additional 108,333 km² coming in in that time too.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the West german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
It had an additional 108,333 km² coming in in that time too.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022, whereas the UK population has increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in, more than are being replaced.
That’s German reunification you grade A fucking moron
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
According to google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2023 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
Eh? I think the stats you're looking at may be West Germany versus modern Germany, so excluding the entirety of East Germany's population in 1970..
According to Google on my chart the German population was 78.17 mn in 1970 versus 83.2 mn in 2021. An exceptionally modest 6.4% increase over the past 51 years.
The UK proportionately gained more than that in the last decade alone.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022, whereas the UK population has increased by around half that, at around 12 million or so, over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in, more than are being replaced.
LOL. They did get quite a lot of land area along with that...
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
That's sound reasoning, 148.
It follows then that Biden will run again, and probably win again. No?
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Guess when it was easiest for ordinary people to afford to buy properties? 1970s and 1980s. Seems like a correlation.
Again, there is some connection, but it's also very, and much too simple, to blame immigration for everything.
Thatcherite policies were specifically concentrated around a property and finance economy.
It is very simple - if you increase the population, without increasing the systems they depend on, to match, then there will be an issue.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Guess when it was easiest for ordinary people to afford to buy properties? 1970s and 1980s. Seems like a correlation.
Again, there is some connection, but it's also very, and much too simple, to blame immigration for everything.
Thatcherite policies were specifically concentrated around a property and finance economy.
How will this affect how people vote? The Conservative Party has, for years, been a party supporting high immigration that has sold itself to the voters as a party supporting low immigration. Will the electorate notice this contradiction, or will they buy the Braverman rhetoric that immigration is a problem but one entirely unconnected to the party that’s been in power for the last 13 years?
CNN's Licht has abandoned all credibility. He continues to defend the absurd Trump event - and then goes on to say that they'll make sure no one else is allowed the same softball treatment.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/18/media/christiane-amanpour-trump-town-hall-reliable-sources/index.html ...Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, disclosed that she had met with CNN boss Chris Licht this week and that the two “had a very robust exchange of views” about the matter. She said that Licht “welcomed that exchange of views,” but stood by his decision to hold the town hall. Licht told staffers the morning after the event that he believed it was worthwhile because it woke people up to the stakes of the 2024 election.
After hearing out Licht, Amanpour told the Columbia Journalism School graduates that she had not been moved.
“I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format,” the veteran anchor said, contending that the American people had demonstrated with their votes in the last three elections that they are well aware of his behavior.
“I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’ but then that’s me,” Amanpour candidly added, recounting the moment when Trump lashed out at moderator Kaitlan Collins for asking a question that he did not like.
Inside CNN, Amanpour is far from alone in her views. In private, the town hall has been widely criticized by employees at all levels across the organization. Some of these employees believe that Trump wasn’t worthy of a town hall platform after leading the insurrection on the US Capitol and continuing to spew dangerous lies about the 2020 election. Others believe that it was a worthy endeavor to confront him, but that the event was poorly executed....
...The award-winning anchor also described the raucous town hall audience — which cheered Trump on as he mocked sexual abuse claims — as part of the problem. It was CNN’s venue, she contended, and should not have allowed for the jeering and cheering.
Licht conceded to her “the execution” of the town hall “was lacking a little,” she said, and he assured her that “we will not witness that same appalling behavior in future town halls.”..
Having Trump on tv makes networks money. So Trump can control how he goes on network tv. Hence the crowd full of people who already loved him. No one else brings in the ratings like Trump, so no one else has the leverage to make sure they're treated that way. So he'll get more free and if not positive then at least helpful media. Like Johnson here with the papers in the UK, Trump is a creation of the US media and understands how it works and how to play it to his advantage.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the West german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
It had an additional 108,333 km² coming in in that time too.
We need a Lebensraum policy.
My living room is a bit small. True, that is the fault of She Who Must Be Obeyed in speccing the sofa.... {gets map of Russia out}
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
In terms of population increase, the big one that noone talks about is the USA
203,392,031 1970 336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
They have rather creaking infrastructure, though expansion is less of a problem in much of the US. The part of the US that have tried to enforce no change have seen similar problems in housing, utilities etc.
In terms of population increase, the big one that noone talks about is the USA
203,392,031 1970 336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
While America has plenty of problems, especially when it comes to racism, they've thankfully not gone as far down the NIMBY avenue as us so are handling population growth better.
Plus they've got a lot of not very densely populated spaces. They could comfortably fit a billion plus people if they wanted to.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
That's true, but it's important to note that the increases written there are not simply in proportion to the local population, though.
Germany seems to have had about double the population increase of us, but only has about 15 million more people overall.
Oh FFS you're not still including reunifaction as a population increase are you!? 🤦♂️
Germany has not had any significant population increase, either in the past 2 decades or 5 decades. Unless you count 03/10/1990 as tens of millions of population growth. 🤦♂️
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
That's sound reasoning, 148.
It follows then that Biden will run again, and probably win again. No?
I think Biden is a slight favourite, mostly due to incumbency and Trump's unique disapproval amongst certain parts of the electorate. On the other hand, the economy is flailing about and the GOP control the House and have no incentive to help fix the economy, so that could get worse and help Trump. And if any political party can screw this up, it would be the Democratic party - they managed to screw it up with Hillary.
The Dems biggest problem is that to get through popular policies they need the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, POTUS and SCOTUS - whereas for the GOP to get tax cuts and shafting the average poor worker they just have to sit and wait for the Dems to eventually offer it to them. The US vetocracy gives those who don't believe in the usefulness of governance an inbuilt advantage.
Last general election the Dems ran on the unique awfulness of Trump, which I think was the wrong strategy - it barely got them the House and Senate. They really need to run on the extremeness of the GOP as a whole. Roe v Wade going away has helped slightly with that, but the material impact of that is horrendous and the Democratic response has been appalling (for example Biden could have just said all federal military land in any state could be used to set up medical centres for women's healthcare no matter what the state is, and no state would really be able to stop him). Instead they use it as a fund raising narrative with no strategy to actually do anything.
In terms of population increase, the big one that noone talks about is the USA
203,392,031 1970 336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
While America has plenty of problems, especially when it comes to racism, they've thankfully not gone as far down the NIMBY avenue as us so are handling population growth better.
Plus they've got a lot of not very densely populated spaces. They could comfortably fit a billion plus people if they wanted to.
They have a lot of space but fast growing areas in the west have real problems with water, while much of Florida, another area seeing rapid population growth, could end up underwater if sea levels rise.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the West german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in,
It had an additional 108,333 km² coming in in that time too.
We need a Lebensraum policy.
My living room is a bit small. True, that is the fault of She Who Must Be Obeyed in speccing the sofa.... {gets map of Russia out}
You might want to consult climate data as well as a map
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
That's sound reasoning, 148.
It follows then that Biden will run again, and probably win again. No?
I hope that's the most likely single scenario, but there's a risk of a repeat of 2016 in the sense that Biden's negatives (inflation, Afghanistan, incumbent at a time when the US is not happy, etc) might be more prominent in voters' mind than Trump's, just as the electorate seemed to pay more heed to Clinton's weaknesses in 2016 than to Trump's.
I have no idea how big that risk is, but there are enough polls which give Trump the least in a head-to-head with Biden that I'm quite concerned. Trump might be value for winning in 2024.
In terms of population increase, the big one that noone talks about is the USA
203,392,031 1970 336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
While America has plenty of problems, especially when it comes to racism, they've thankfully not gone as far down the NIMBY avenue as us so are handling population growth better.
Plus they've got a lot of not very densely populated spaces. They could comfortably fit a billion plus people if they wanted to.
Yeah it was a very underpopulated space back in 1970 - Google tells me the European population (Similar area) was 656 million in 1970 and is only 752 million now and... going backwards apparently.
Trump 2020 lawyer indicated he may be target of Fulton County probe, court docs say https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/17/trump-lawyer-target-fulton-county-probe-00097582 Ray Smith III, a lawyer who represented President Donald Trump in litigation aimed at reversing Georgia’s 2020 election results, has indicated he may be a target of Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis’ criminal probe.
Smith’s attorney, Bruce Morris, characterized Smith as “something between a target and witness” in Willis’ nearly completed investigation, according to documents filed Wednesday in a federal civil lawsuit in Washington D.C. That characterization was revealed by lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — two former Georgia election workers who are suing Rudy Giuliani for defamation...
...It’s the latest indication of the wide net Willis is casting as she nears the expected indictment phase of her investigation. She recently indicated that she has obtained information about potential crimes committed by at least one or two of the false presidential electors enlisted by Trump as part of a last-ditch bid to overturn the election results. Trump himself is believed to be a target of her probe, which was the subject of a year-long special grand jury investigation that concluded in January.
The special grand jury, which had no power to issue indictments, issued a still-secret report recommending charges against an unknown number of figures connected to Donald Trump — potentially including Trump.
Willis is now conducting additional witness interviews as she prepares to present her case to a traditional grand jury with the power to issue indictments. She has reportedly told local law enforcement to expect indictment decisions as early as July
In terms of population increase, the big one that noone talks about is the USA
203,392,031 1970 336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
While America has plenty of problems, especially when it comes to racism, they've thankfully not gone as far down the NIMBY avenue as us so are handling population growth better.
Plus they've got a lot of not very densely populated spaces. They could comfortably fit a billion plus people if they wanted to.
Yeah it was a very underpopulated space back in 1970 - Google tells me the European population (Similar area) was 656 million in 1970 and is only 752 million now and... going backwards apparently.
Indeed. Ties in economically with something I've mentioned a few times before - in the 1980s Thatcher famously said that the then-12 EEC countries combined had an economy greater than America's.
That was true then but has not been remotely true for a very long time now. America's economy absolutely dwarfs Europe's now, even including the UK and even including the 16 extra countries that had subsequently joined the EU.
Partially that's due to sclerotic European economic growth in the past few decades, and partially that's due to America's considerably higher population growth.
The facts of the world today are completely different to the facts 40/50 years ago.
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
That's sound reasoning, 148.
It follows then that Biden will run again, and probably win again. No?
I hope that's the most likely single scenario, but there's a risk of a repeat of 2016 in the sense that Biden's negatives (inflation, Afghanistan, incumbent at a time when the US is not happy, etc) might be more prominent in voters' mind than Trump's, just as the electorate seemed to pay more heed to Clinton's weaknesses in 2016 than to Trump's.
I have no idea how big that risk is, but there are enough polls which give Trump the least in a head-to-head with Biden that I'm quite concerned. Trump might be value for winning in 2024.
Trump is marmite though. A majority of Americans would, I think, vote for Biden 'in the circumstances'.
Tuberville finds himself at center of storm on abortion, white nationalism https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4009324-tuberville-finds-himself-at-center-of-storm-on-abortion-white-nationalism/ Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has placed himself at the center of a growing storm touching on abortion, the military and white nationalism, irritating colleagues and turning himself into a more high-profile political target. The former Auburn University football coach turned first-term Alabama senator has annoyed fellow Republicans with a hold on military promotions, earning rare criticism from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who loathes to publicly criticize a fellow GOP senator. He then made his troubles worse by criticizing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a local NPR interview for wanting to get “the white extremists, the white nationalists” out of the military. Pressed on those remarks, Tuberville said he’d call white nationalists “Americans.” ..
...Tuberville has effectively blocked promotions for roughly 200 senior military officials in key regions over the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which allows service members to take leave and provides travel reimbursements for those who need to travel to get an abortion. That is a more common need since the end of Roe...
Hurrah for the Blackshirts redux. Obviously the successful track records of dictators is seductive.
The faults of democracies are clear and obvious. Nothing gets done because vested interests prevent it. It stands to reason that a strongman is needed to do what's needed.
Usually, that turns out to be completely wrong but it seems intuitive.
Point taken on the German reunification issue, which was not included in the original stats page, and I ofcourse should have subtracted for to begin with.
However, looking up, there's something rather interesting, which indicates overall that the major population centres ( in Western Germany and Berlin ) have actually had a very similar level of immigration to the UK over the last fifty years, but with wages and water standards remaining much higher. About 3 million have immigrated from Eastern Germany to those population centres over the last 30 years, which together with the non-Germans, altogether brings up some very similar kinds of figures for population changes and mobility to the UK.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
Saying you need more infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population means saying that the population is increasing. Which means saying immigration is happening. Which via some blobular* leap, is tantamount to racism. Far easier to pretend the population is static.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
That's true, but it's also easy to blame every kind of failure of free-market fundamentalism on immgration. That's just another kind of taboo.
If the population is growing at 0.5% a year, and the various services do not expand to match, what do you think happens?
Anything can also happen depending on how one legislate, invests or plans.
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
Germany has almost the same population as 20 or 30 years ago. The UK's population is 10 million higher.
From what I can see on Google, the german population increased by 23 million between 1970-2022 ; whereas the UK population increased by around 10 million less over the same timeframe.
Indeed. On current trends the UK is forecast to overtake Germany as Europe's largest country and economy later this century.
From 8 years ago…..when U.K. net immigration was lower…..
According to estimates from Eurostat, Britain is on track to become the most populous country in the European Union by 2050. Its current population is 65 million and this is set to grow to about 77 million within the next 35 years, surpassing both France and Germany.
I find all this population talk very worrying. It's clear to me that the reason this is an issue is because in Western countries the amount of highly exploitable labour is reducing, and that increasingly politicians are turning to blaming immigrants for problems that are caused by neoliberalism.
For companies to keep making profits, workers need to have less leverage. For workers to have less leverage, their needs to be an oversupply of workers. There are only two ways to do that - have more babies born, or bring over workers from elsewhere. Since Covid, a huge number of workers have left the workforce in Western countries; due to illness and death, due to early retirement, or due to realising that the 9-5 lifestyle was just not for them. This also combined with a tightening on the movement of labour; you had travel restrictions and so on. So the worker pool reduced and the existing workers could flex their muscles more: hence an explosion in the union movement both in the US and UK. This is happening at the same time as inflation: where companies originally had issues due to supply chains and war, and are now likely just using those as excuses to profiteer.
The "we have to grow our population" rhetoric, beyond just being old school social conservatism of controlling women's bodily autonomy, is a direct response to capitals need for labour. Automation is not good enough yet / would also create a reaction that capital is not willing to provoke too quickly. Maybe I'm too much of a Marxist materialist, but the creeping fashy talk of "more white babies" seems to be equal parts culture war / reproducing capitalism.
Hurrah for the Blackshirts redux. Obviously the successful track records of dictators is seductive.
The faults of democracies are clear and obvious. Nothing gets done because vested interests prevent it. It stands to reason that a strongman is needed to do what's needed.
Usually, that turns out to be completely wrong but it seems intuitive.
Strongmen don't do what's needed, though. They do what they want. Usually to the detriment of everyone else.
Point taken on the German reunification issue, which was not included in the original stats page.
However, looking up, there's something rather interesting, which indicates overall that the major population centres ( in Western Germany and Berlin ) have actually had a very similar level of immigration to the UK over the last fifty years, but with wages and water standards remaining much higher. About 3 million have immigrated from Eastern Germany to those population centres over the last 30 years, which together with the non-Germans, altogether brings up a very similar figure for rise in the population to the UK.
Hurrah for the Blackshirts redux. Obviously the successful track records of dictators is seductive.
The faults of democracies are clear and obvious. Nothing gets done because vested interests prevent it. It stands to reason that a strongman is needed to do what's needed.
Usually, that turns out to be completely wrong but it seems intuitive.
Strongmen don't do what's needed, though. They do what they want. Usually to the detriment of everyone else.
Depends. Cromwell is lauded by both the right (huge supporter of God, England, etc) and the left (overthrew a tyrannical monarch) and I think it reasonable to say he wasn't your everyday strongman just as it is reasonable to say he was an everyday strongman but decided not to behave like one.
Many of the things that have made the US the most powerful and successful society on the planet - its physical size, its diversity of people and perspectives, its decentralised system of government, its brutal winner takes all economic system - also make it divided and unstable. They've already had one civil war (two if you include the revolutionary war) and it's not at all hard to imagine them having another one.
Point taken on the German reunification issue, which was not included in the original stats page.
However, looking up, there's something rather interesting, which indicates overall that the major population centres ( in Western Germany and Berlin ) have actually had a very similar level of immigration to the UK over the last fifty years, but with wages and water standards remaining much higher. About 3 million have immigrated from Eastern Germany to those population centres over the last 30 years, which together with the non-Germans, altogether brings up a very similar figure for rise in the population to the UK.
Are you on ketamine?
I've never tried Ketamine, only some mushrooms very briefly, during the 1980's.
The main population centres overall have had the same kind of rises as the UK. Obviously intra-country immigration is not the same as external immigration because stresses are spread out, and overall demands may be the same ; but you'd still expect what goes on in big cities to affect the rest of the country disproportionately. It's also only about 2-3 million of the 11 million figure.
Many of the things that have made the US the most powerful and successful society on the planet - its physical size, its diversity of people and perspectives, its decentralised system of government, its brutal winner takes all economic system - also make it divided and unstable. They've already had one civil war (two if you include the revolutionary war) and it's not at all hard to imagine them having another one.
That doesn't explain why the USA in about 1990 was far less divided than it is now.
Hurrah for the Blackshirts redux. Obviously the successful track records of dictators is seductive.
The faults of democracies are clear and obvious. Nothing gets done because vested interests prevent it. It stands to reason that a strongman is needed to do what's needed.
Usually, that turns out to be completely wrong but it seems intuitive.
This is the case for centralised representative democracies; I would suggest it is not the case for decentralised direct democracies.
As for vested interests - they have more power under a strongman because they only need to buy him and his cronies; in a democracy you have to buy so many more people, and the fact that any scrutiny happens at all means that it can sometimes take time. One tyrant from which all power flows is a lot simpler. That's part of why capitalism is very willing to work with fascism.
Comments
I used to like Shaun Keaveney. Not particularly challenging musically, but a good start to the day. Lauren Laverne - his replacement - is like listening to a hen night with the odd intrusion of 1Xtra (surely the point of 1Xtra is that the rest of us shouldn't have to listen to that sort of thing?) I suspect Shaun Keaveney was a victim of BBC Radio feeling it needed to rejig its gender balance a bit.
My alternative is XS Manchester (or XFM) - but that is pure Britpop dads, and nothing at all you haven't heard before. And you'll never get Half Man Half Biscuit or the Fall. But the wife likes listening to music she knows and there's rarely anything on there that I hate.
On the graph, for instance, that period seems to have not only the one where it has slowed, but it also seems to be one of the first periods whee the trend has actually partly gone into reverse. So to me, I have to say, and to put it mildly, it would stretch credulity that that would suddebly be the inflection point of the kind of long-term process, especially also as there's such an obviously large other input, which is the huge changes in regulation over exactly that same timeframe.
90% of radio programming would just as likely be made by commercial stations. The BBC needs to concentrate on the other 10%. How many listeners have they lost to Times Radio on DAB?
But what is the agreed threshold? Has that actually been happening?
We are using far more water than we were pre-privatisation, and far less is being dumped as sewerage into waterways than was happening pre-privatisation.
Discharges into waterways are part of how the system has worked since it was created in the Victorian era onwards. If we want to eliminate that, that will require a change in thresholds and investment to go with that accordingly.
*Yes I know I said just yesterday referring to the blob is lazy. But its hard to come up with something as pithy to describe, well, the blob. I acknowledge the blob is not a hive mind but a lot of disparate while sometimes aligned interests and worldviews and not a consipracy.
The change in number is a second-order derivative. Eg if you accelerate onto a motorway and do 70mph then that is your speed. If you then add another 20mph you're now doing 90. If you then add another 15mph, then another 10mph, then another 5mph then what speed are you going? Is it safe, is it slower than it was before?
Also the chart ends at 2018. Apparently the number for the past 12 months looks like being about 700k according to reports, so will be even higher than then - and again its on top of everyone added then.
It's worth recognising that while the *appearance* of not being racist is all important, the actual reality seems to be less so. Hence the Met Police spending vast sums on courses, credentials etc at the same time as stopping people for Driving While Black.
That makes it pretty likely that it's not the primary cause, I would say there.
Woke-signalling at COP26 "We must do more" etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaMZoK343Q0 - reality, Canada just about the worst in the world for CO2 with the Alberta oilsand extraction https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back.
Here we go again: Next piece in troubled ESN upgrade
The UK’s Home Office has put up to £895 million on offer in the search for a tech supplier to provide “user services” for the Emergency Services Network, a controversial public sector project that is delayed by more than five years and over-spent by billions of pounds.
The ESN has long been intended to replace Airwave, the UK’s current radio communications system for ambulance, fire services and police which offers very limited data services.
Contracting began 2015, when it was forecast that some services would be live in 2017. Now it seems unlikely that the full replacement will be ready before 2029.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/18/home_office_launches_895_million/
One might also ask what happens in Germany, with higher immigration, higher wages, and higher water standards ?
The consequences are obvious and lamentable.
Certainly AI will impact jobs, but it's hard to draw general conclusions from the particular case.
When it comes to the actual number of discharges, they're far below what they were pre-privatisation.
Standards and expectations are rising and that's a good thing. But there's no reason we shouldn't have even higher standards in the future.
Now, with the odd exception, it seriously dumbed down. And god, the mind numbing tedium of most of the afternoon shows.
https://twitter.com/NLwartracker/status/1659104968882761733
NLwartracker
@NLwartracker
1/6 Elements of the 10th Tank regiment part of the newly formed 3rd 🇷🇺 army corps, arrived around 13th of may in the area of the town of Odradivka (48.494300,38.014800). They had previously been deployed near Avdiivka, were they were involved a multiple failed frontal assaults
...
NLwartracker
@NLwartracker
6/6 🇺🇦 forces are moving slowly as not to overstretch their lines on both sides of Bakhmut, so next weeks will be crucial to the fate of Russian/Wagner sources inside the city, if 🇺🇦 can move beyond the T0513, things are starting to look grim for these forces.
#SlavaUkraïni 🇺🇦🇺🇦
Contrary to what is often claimed, the growth in support for Alliance is not evidence of a growth in centre-ground politics. Alliance has gained votes at the expense of SDLP and UUP and Greens, the other centre-ground parties.
Sinn Fein will probably win close to 30%, and between them, DUP and TUV win slightly more than 30%.
Though given the current state of the GOP, I'm not inclined to lay the bet for now.
The rise in complaints, though, started about five years ago, from what I recall. As mentioned, I'll try and dig out some of the older articles and links I've seen later on, on this, if still having a quieter day.
At 36 mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyjsT3tbjgY
I get more from occasional forays to Piccadilly Records on my lunch break (and their brilliant end-of-year breakdowns do a lot of work for the lazy listeners like me).
Population of Germany in 2000: 82.21 mn
Population of Germany in 2021: 83.20 mn
Net change: 0.99mn
Percentage change: 1.19%
Population of the UK in 2000: 58.89mn
Population of the UK in 2021: 67.33mn
Net change: 8.44mn
Percentage change: 14.33%
Slight difference there in the percentages. Only a whole order of magnitude and then some off.
Alister Jack takes difference stance to Home Secretary Suella Braverman on migration.
Scottish Secretary says he's 'entirely supportive' of high levels of migration to boost Scottish workforce.
Story: itv.com/news/border/20…
https://twitter.com/itvborderrb/status/1659141999184805889
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536?s=20
TL:DR - it’s bad and likely to get worse.
We need to switch to a mode where infrastructure is based around a 0.5% increase (to pick a number out of hat). This is a long way from steady state.
The other day, someone here protested that building x hundred thousand homes would "change the character of the country".
The character of the country is, in large measure, formed by the people living in it.
The character of the country has already changed.
In times past, building one more house every other year in every village of a hundred homes would have been seen as a bit of growth.
Cornwall, for instance, could add a few house to every hamlet and add 25K homes to the 250K that already exists.
People and their infrastructure are to be celebrated, not treated as toxic waste.
Also Germany has consistently had much, much lower birth rates too than the UK.
All up, it means far more population growth in the UK than Germany. Far, far more - and that wouldn't be an issue but we've not had the construction growth to match it.
First, and most importantly - who is the viable alternative? DeSantis is a charisma vacuum who is pissing off the money men. Nikki Hailey appeals to Romney Republicans, who maybe make up 10-15% of the GOP primary voter. Mike Pence appeals to even fewer of those voters.
Second - the legal issues are a big problem for winning the general election, but the primary are easier because of them. The GOP base is entirely fuelled by a victimhood narrative, and this is just a continuation of the "witch hunt" for Trump. His polling has improved since the FBI raid, for instance, and whilst we haven't had long enough to see the impact of this civil case, the base have it baked in that he is a sex pest - that's why lots of evangelicals compare Trump to Cyrus; an imperfect and non believing Persian king whose actions still benefited God's overall plan.
Third - the US TV media cannot quit Trump. The CNN town hall last week is evidence of this already; strangely the only cable network that might be quiet about Trump in this election could be Fox and that's only due to how much they got sued and how much "talent" they're losing. But the other networks believe that Trump brings them ratings, and so he will be the headliner, getting free media all the time. Whether or not they are critical of him, it doesn't matter, he will suck up the oxygen.
Fourth - weirdly, policy. Trump actually has some unorthodox GOP positions that are popular with the base. He has said he doesn't want to cut social security or medicare / medicaid. He says he is anti war, and is specifically anti the Russian / Ukraine war (something lots of the US populace blame for inflation, and something where lots of the US right are in favour of Russia winning). He is isolationist in a way, again, Nikki Hailey and Mike Pence are not. I think another trade war with China would sink him in the general but, again, the GOP primary voters are not the general electorate.
Short of Trump dying, I don't see anyone else taking him on.
Germany has had a lot of people coming in, more than are being replaced.
Thatcherite policies were specifically concentrated around a property and finance economy.
He continues to defend the absurd Trump event - and then goes on to say that they'll make sure no one else is allowed the same softball treatment.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/18/media/christiane-amanpour-trump-town-hall-reliable-sources/index.html
...Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, disclosed that she had met with CNN boss Chris Licht this week and that the two “had a very robust exchange of views” about the matter. She said that Licht “welcomed that exchange of views,” but stood by his decision to hold the town hall. Licht told staffers the morning after the event that he believed it was worthwhile because it woke people up to the stakes of the 2024 election.
After hearing out Licht, Amanpour told the Columbia Journalism School graduates that she had not been moved.
“I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format,” the veteran anchor said, contending that the American people had demonstrated with their votes in the last three elections that they are well aware of his behavior.
“I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’ but then that’s me,” Amanpour candidly added, recounting the moment when Trump lashed out at moderator Kaitlan Collins for asking a question that he did not like.
Inside CNN, Amanpour is far from alone in her views. In private, the town hall has been widely criticized by employees at all levels across the organization. Some of these employees believe that Trump wasn’t worthy of a town hall platform after leading the insurrection on the US Capitol and continuing to spew dangerous lies about the 2020 election. Others believe that it was a worthy endeavor to confront him, but that the event was poorly executed....
...The award-winning anchor also described the raucous town hall audience — which cheered Trump on as he mocked sexual abuse claims — as part of the problem. It was CNN’s venue, she contended, and should not have allowed for the jeering and cheering.
Licht conceded to her “the execution” of the town hall “was lacking a little,” she said, and he assured her that “we will not witness that same appalling behavior in future town halls.”..
According to Google on my chart the German population was 78.17 mn in 1970 versus 83.2 mn in 2021. An exceptionally modest 6.4% increase over the past 51 years.
The UK proportionately gained more than that in the last decade alone.
Germany 1970 78,578,385
UK 1970 55,573,543
Germany now 84,551,543
UK now 68,907,990
from https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
They did get quite a lot of land area along with that...
It follows then that Biden will run again, and probably win again. No?
It's not about ideology. It's about practicality.
203,392,031 1970
336,523,223 now
according to Google.
That'd be an equivalent of ~ 92 million for the UK now.
I know India, Nigeria will be more but they're not comparable demographically or economically to the UK/Europe.
Germany seems to have had about double the population increase of us, but only has about 15 million more people overall.
Plus they've got a lot of not very densely populated spaces. They could comfortably fit a billion plus people if they wanted to.
Germany has not had any significant population increase, either in the past 2 decades or 5 decades. Unless you count 03/10/1990 as tens of millions of population growth. 🤦♂️
The Dems biggest problem is that to get through popular policies they need the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, POTUS and SCOTUS - whereas for the GOP to get tax cuts and shafting the average poor worker they just have to sit and wait for the Dems to eventually offer it to them. The US vetocracy gives those who don't believe in the usefulness of governance an inbuilt advantage.
Last general election the Dems ran on the unique awfulness of Trump, which I think was the wrong strategy - it barely got them the House and Senate. They really need to run on the extremeness of the GOP as a whole. Roe v Wade going away has helped slightly with that, but the material impact of that is horrendous and the Democratic response has been appalling (for example Biden could have just said all federal military land in any state could be used to set up medical centres for women's healthcare no matter what the state is, and no state would really be able to stop him). Instead they use it as a fund raising narrative with no strategy to actually do anything.
Obviously the successful track records of dictators is seductive.
I have no idea how big that risk is, but there are enough polls which give Trump the least in a head-to-head with Biden that I'm quite concerned. Trump might be value for winning in 2024.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/17/trump-lawyer-target-fulton-county-probe-00097582
Ray Smith III, a lawyer who represented President Donald Trump in litigation aimed at reversing Georgia’s 2020 election results, has indicated he may be a target of Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis’ criminal probe.
Smith’s attorney, Bruce Morris, characterized Smith as “something between a target and witness” in Willis’ nearly completed investigation, according to documents filed Wednesday in a federal civil lawsuit in Washington D.C. That characterization was revealed by lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — two former Georgia election workers who are suing Rudy Giuliani for defamation...
...It’s the latest indication of the wide net Willis is casting as she nears the expected indictment phase of her investigation. She recently indicated that she has obtained information about potential crimes committed by at least one or two of the false presidential electors enlisted by Trump as part of a last-ditch bid to overturn the election results. Trump himself is believed to be a target of her probe, which was the subject of a year-long special grand jury investigation that concluded in January.
The special grand jury, which had no power to issue indictments, issued a still-secret report recommending charges against an unknown number of figures connected to Donald Trump — potentially including Trump.
Willis is now conducting additional witness interviews as she prepares to present her case to a traditional grand jury with the power to issue indictments. She has reportedly told local law enforcement to expect indictment decisions as early as July
That was true then but has not been remotely true for a very long time now. America's economy absolutely dwarfs Europe's now, even including the UK and even including the 16 extra countries that had subsequently joined the EU.
Partially that's due to sclerotic European economic growth in the past few decades, and partially that's due to America's considerably higher population growth.
The facts of the world today are completely different to the facts 40/50 years ago.
Lawyers are the epitome of ethics and integrity.
UK crime agency to pursue up to 100 lawyers accused of helping traffickers
Exclusive: Solicitors believed to be assisting criminal gangs who abuse modern slavery laws to gain asylum
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/18/uk-crime-agency-pursue-lawyers-accused-helping-traffickers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4009324-tuberville-finds-himself-at-center-of-storm-on-abortion-white-nationalism/
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has placed himself at the center of a growing storm touching on abortion, the military and white nationalism, irritating colleagues and turning himself into a more high-profile political target.
The former Auburn University football coach turned first-term Alabama senator has annoyed fellow Republicans with a hold on military promotions, earning rare criticism from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who loathes to publicly criticize a fellow GOP senator.
He then made his troubles worse by criticizing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a local NPR interview for wanting to get “the white extremists, the white nationalists” out of the military. Pressed on those remarks, Tuberville said he’d call white nationalists “Americans.” ..
...Tuberville has effectively blocked promotions for roughly 200 senior military officials in key regions over the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which allows service members to take leave and provides travel reimbursements for those who need to travel to get an abortion. That is a more common need since the end of Roe...
Usually, that turns out to be completely wrong but it seems intuitive.
However, looking up, there's something rather interesting, which indicates overall that the major population centres ( in Western Germany and Berlin ) have actually had a very similar level of immigration to the UK over the last fifty years, but with wages and water standards remaining much higher. About 3 million have immigrated from Eastern Germany to those population centres over the last 30 years, which together with the non-Germans, altogether brings up some very similar kinds of figures for population changes and mobility to the UK.
According to estimates from Eurostat, Britain is on track to become the most populous country in the European Union by 2050. Its current population is 65 million and this is set to grow to about 77 million within the next 35 years, surpassing both France and Germany.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/3684/forecasted-population-growth-in-the-eu/
Around the time knowledge of that might have been behind Merkel’s “all are welcome” refugee call….
For companies to keep making profits, workers need to have less leverage. For workers to have less leverage, their needs to be an oversupply of workers. There are only two ways to do that - have more babies born, or bring over workers from elsewhere. Since Covid, a huge number of workers have left the workforce in Western countries; due to illness and death, due to early retirement, or due to realising that the 9-5 lifestyle was just not for them. This also combined with a tightening on the movement of labour; you had travel restrictions and so on. So the worker pool reduced and the existing workers could flex their muscles more: hence an explosion in the union movement both in the US and UK. This is happening at the same time as inflation: where companies originally had issues due to supply chains and war, and are now likely just using those as excuses to profiteer.
The "we have to grow our population" rhetoric, beyond just being old school social conservatism of controlling women's bodily autonomy, is a direct response to capitals need for labour. Automation is not good enough yet / would also create a reaction that capital is not willing to provoke too quickly. Maybe I'm too much of a Marxist materialist, but the creeping fashy talk of "more white babies" seems to be equal parts culture war / reproducing capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNMQqh1ovlM
You don't want a criminal lawyer, you want a 'criminal' lawyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Vital_statistics
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/17/politics/trump-letter-archives-special-counsel-declassification/index.html
The main population centres overall have had the same kind of rises as the UK. Obviously intra-country immigration is not the same as external immigration because stresses are spread out, and overall demands may be the same ; but you'd still expect what goes on in big cities to affect the rest of the country disproportionately. It's also only about 2-3 million of the 11 million figure.
As for vested interests - they have more power under a strongman because they only need to buy him and his cronies; in a democracy you have to buy so many more people, and the fact that any scrutiny happens at all means that it can sometimes take time. One tyrant from which all power flows is a lot simpler. That's part of why capitalism is very willing to work with fascism.