Would it make any particular difference if Shakespeare was an invention and Marlowe had written all the plays? I'm not sure you can hang the foundations of Empire onto that.
There are people who will tell you that the medieval church made a mistake in counting years, and there's an extra century that's been snuck in, and such fantastical conjectures are possible because the documentary evidence is sparse, and there are large gaps. I think people are asking for an impossible standard of proof when they point at certain gaps in the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's career. There are well-founded reasons to think that certain items in the canon perhaps ought not to be there, it is fuzzy around the edges, but it's an incredible stretch to imagine that it's all invention.
Just checked the ULEZ compliance of my household's current and former vehicles.
Our petrol cars going back to 2007 and our 2015 diesel are all ULEZ compliant. All the older cars back to the 1990s, sadly, don't show up, which I guess means they've been scrapped.
How many non compliant cars are there actually?
About 150k-200k such cars travel into the zone per day currently. Over a year it is about 700k cars that would have to pay at least once.
Presumably a fairly large proportion of those vehicles (not just cars I assume) are from outside London, where air pollution is much less of a problem? Ergo they are importing particulates into the capital for us to suck up then returning to their homes in cleaner air?
To coin a cliche, I would find it hard to craft a sufficiently tiny violin.
Fox Jr had asthma as a child. It disappeared immediately after we moved out of the city. Leicester is particularly bad for car fumes as away from the sea and in a shallow bowl.
Air pollution is a killer, and not just in children:
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
You have to take everything to extremes. What infringement on civil liberty?
My car is 13 years old and its ULEZ-compliant, I would not have to pay ULEZ if I drove into London. And if I did, I might debate the politics of that, but its not an infringement of civil liberties to pay a tax or charge.
I haven't said anything about 'civil liberties' you silly arse.
"this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty"
Sorry, you said personal rather than civil liberty. What a silly arse I am, I'll get the type of liberty we're discussing right next time. 🤦♂️
He did say in reply to me earlier, "I feel deeply sorry for that family that their girl's tragic death is being used as moral blackmail to undermine peoples' access to the freedom to personal transportation."
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
Would it make any particular difference if Shakespeare was an invention and Marlowe had written all the plays? I'm not sure you can hang the foundations of Empire onto that.
There are people who will tell you that the medieval church made a mistake in counting years, and there's an extra century that's been snuck in, and such fantastical conjectures are possible because the documentary evidence is sparse, and there are large gaps. I think people are asking for an impossible standard of proof when they point at certain gaps in the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's career. There are well-founded reasons to think that certain items in the canon perhaps ought not to be there, it is fuzzy around the edges, but it's an incredible stretch to imagine that it's all invention.
Yes this is my view, the conventional view on Shakespeare is probably right, even highly likely to be right. But I think it's interesting to delve into why it matters so much for people. As indeed it does for me, I am a worshipper at the cult of Shakespeare as much as anyone.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
My rent in Edinburgh, for a three-bedroom flat, was £710 per month, and for a similar amount he was able to pay interest on a huge house in Wimbledon! Oh my days.
If the stupid bugger had switched to a repayment mortgage as soon as he could afford to do so, he would have paid most of the mortgage off by now.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
American comedian Roseanne Barr has been criticised for a podcast interview in which she said that six million Jews 'should be killed.'
In a conversation with provocative comedian Theo Von, Barr, 70, said the Holocaust never happened, "but should have" as "Jews cause all the problems in the world."
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
On topic, and returning to my chronic vs acute analogy earlier, I do think Sunak’s long slow decline in VI and leader ratings will be much harder to turn around than the sort of rapid collapse we saw with Truss.
Not that Truss herself could have turned it around, but political leaders have seen big volatility in ratings in the past and tended to be able to bounce back more easily from short sharp plunges than slower drawn out ones. Thatcher bumped around a lot in her early years but clawed it back. Blair’s Labour had a few rapid drops, like during the lorry driver strike. Johnson had volatile ratings early on. But the ones who drifted slowly downwards after reasonable peaks never seemed to be able to reverse the trend. Major, Blair after around 2003/4, Ed Miliband, Johnson himself in a slightly more ratcheted way each time a new indignity came along.
I mean what does Sunak do to get back up there? The voters have the measure of this front bench now. He might he able to level off Tory fortunes a bit, but his only other hope must be for Labour to cock up big time between now and the election.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
No.
You can certainly drive through the middle of the city more easily in Birmingham.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
I’m midway through Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Boy is it grim reading. Humans are nasty pieces of work.
I like to think of us as having boundless capacity to do good and bad.
We do appear unfortunately more prone to the latter than the former, or being herded that way, despite being more inclined personally to do good on the whole.
I disagree. Thousands of little and large selfless good acts occur every day. But the only things that get reported are the bad deeds, because they are far more newsworthy. "Man donates kidney to stranger" would be a story on page 15 of the Westmoreland Gazette; "man stabs man in drunken brawl" would be front page.
In all seriousness, there are massive numbers of small good acts going on all around us. We just tend not to notice them.
BBC should have mandatory good news quota. I'd think even 15% minimum positive news stories per week would have a significant impact on national psyche and cohesion over the long term.
Doesn't work for a commercial broadcaster as bad and dramatic news sells better, but absolutely something that could fit within the BBC remit.
...
10 dead in tragic train explosion.
On the lighter side, Mittins the Kitten, the charming feline lost on the London Underground, has been found alive and well.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
I would rather fair and low taxes in each area.
You seem to have a particular personal aversion to anything environmental. It’s more like the opinions of the US right than anything British.
On topic, and returning to my chronic vs acute analogy earlier, I do think Sunak’s long slow decline in VI and leader ratings will be much harder to turn around than the sort of rapid collapse we saw with Truss.
Not that Truss herself could have turned it around, but political leaders have seen big volatility in ratings in the past and tended to be able to bounce back more easily from short sharp plunges than slower drawn out ones. Thatcher bumped around a lot in her early years but clawed it back. Blair’s Labour had a few rapid drops, like during the lorry driver strike. Johnson had volatile ratings early on. But the ones who drifted slowly downwards after reasonable peaks never seemed to be able to reverse the trend. Major, Blair after around 2003/4, Ed Miliband, Johnson himself in a slightly more ratcheted way each time a new indignity came along.
I mean what does Sunak do to get back up there? The voters have the measure of this front bench now. He might he able to level off Tory fortunes a bit, but his only other hope must be for Labour to cock up big time between now and the election.
Getting rid of Hunt and going for growth, but I don't think he could pull it off credibly. Though it will be interesting to see if one of them cracks and blames the other if Tory fortunes continue to decline. Remember that Hunt's real opinion is that CT should be 16%.
So it seems that the great covid enquiry is determined not to make any reference to border control or its lack during a global pandemic.
No. This initial phase is about pandemic planning. (And there has been some discussion of plans around border controls — Hancock brought it up.)
Later phases will be about what actually happened during the pandemic. There’s way more to come.
Talking about covid, one major synergistic cofactor for morbidity and mortality turned out to be air pollution. Which is quite remarkable given the reduced levels during lockdowns.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
If he's 68 and it "holds three generations of his family", why isn't he charging generations 2 and 3 enough rent to cover it?
American comedian Roseanne Barr has been criticised for a podcast interview in which she said that six million Jews 'should be killed.'
In a conversation with provocative comedian Theo Von, Barr, 70, said the Holocaust never happened, "but should have" as "Jews cause all the problems in the world."
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
“What is tax for?” is going to be the topic of one of my upcoming tax columns. I don’t think we are very good at articulating this, in Britain or elsewhere. Sin taxes are a very interesting example where the primary intention isn’t supposed to be revenue raising, as indeed are customs duties.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
Would it make any particular difference if Shakespeare was an invention and Marlowe had written all the plays? I'm not sure you can hang the foundations of Empire onto that.
There are people who will tell you that the medieval church made a mistake in counting years, and there's an extra century that's been snuck in, and such fantastical conjectures are possible because the documentary evidence is sparse, and there are large gaps. I think people are asking for an impossible standard of proof when they point at certain gaps in the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's career. There are well-founded reasons to think that certain items in the canon perhaps ought not to be there, it is fuzzy around the edges, but it's an incredible stretch to imagine that it's all invention.
Yes this is my view, the conventional view on Shakespeare is probably right, even highly likely to be right. But I think it's interesting to delve into why it matters so much for people. As indeed it does for me, I am a worshipper at the cult of Shakespeare as much as anyone.
It's entirely meaningless because for all practical purposes Shakespeare is defined as the person who wrote the plays we generally think of as by Shakespeare.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house bought for that in 2003 would probably sell for 2-3 times that sum now, even with the latest downturn in prices. A very effective use of gearing, and if he sits out the market downturn in a rental for a couple of years, may well be able to buy similarly with his equity. Luvvly jubbly.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
On topic, and returning to my chronic vs acute analogy earlier, I do think Sunak’s long slow decline in VI and leader ratings will be much harder to turn around than the sort of rapid collapse we saw with Truss.
Not that Truss herself could have turned it around, but political leaders have seen big volatility in ratings in the past and tended to be able to bounce back more easily from short sharp plunges than slower drawn out ones. Thatcher bumped around a lot in her early years but clawed it back. Blair’s Labour had a few rapid drops, like during the lorry driver strike. Johnson had volatile ratings early on. But the ones who drifted slowly downwards after reasonable peaks never seemed to be able to reverse the trend. Major, Blair after around 2003/4, Ed Miliband, Johnson himself in a slightly more ratcheted way each time a new indignity came along.
I mean what does Sunak do to get back up there? The voters have the measure of this front bench now. He might he able to level off Tory fortunes a bit, but his only other hope must be for Labour to cock up big time between now and the election.
Getting rid of Hunt and going for growth, but I don't think he could pull it off credibly. Though it will be interesting to see if one of them cracks and blames the other if Tory fortunes continue to decline. Remember that Hunt's real opinion is that CT should be 16%.
I don’t think either of them is an instinctive fighter. They’re political, but consensus driven types.
Just checked the ULEZ compliance of my household's current and former vehicles.
Our petrol cars going back to 2007 and our 2015 diesel are all ULEZ compliant. All the older cars back to the 1990s, sadly, don't show up, which I guess means they've been scrapped.
How many non compliant cars are there actually?
About 150k-200k such cars travel into the zone per day currently. Over a year it is about 700k cars that would have to pay at least once.
Presumably a fairly large proportion of those vehicles (not just cars I assume) are from outside London, where air pollution is much less of a problem? Ergo they are importing particulates into the capital for us to suck up then returning to their homes in cleaner air?
To coin a cliche, I would find it hard to craft a sufficiently tiny violin.
Fox Jr had asthma as a child. It disappeared immediately after we moved out of the city. Leicester is particularly bad for car fumes as away from the sea and in a shallow bowl.
Air pollution is a killer, and not just in children:
I had coughing problems when younger - they stopped when I no longer lived in a house with carpets.
Were those carpets forced on you by passing commuters? No matter how hard you tried to get rid of them, you'd wake of a morning and find that carpets had come in through the vents, under the front door. You couldn't leave the window open of a summer for fear a rug would insinuate itself into your room. You would go outside to hang the washing out, and come back in to find a throw draped across your sofa and a drape thrown across your window. A pile of mats lurking near the dining room table. Weaves and tapestries bristling their way up your stairs at night.
No, they were forced on me by my parents who have always had carpets as did almost everyone else when I was young.
I'm not belittling air pollution which is an important issue.
And not just in this country.
Would you support tariffs on imports from countries with air pollutions problems far greater than this country ?
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
£770 pcm for an £850k house?
I was paying more than that on my rent on a house worth about a fifth of that.
20 years into a mortgage the property should be all but paid off by now.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
My rent in Edinburgh, for a three-bedroom flat, was £710 per month, and for a similar amount he was able to pay interest on a huge house in Wimbledon! Oh my days.
If the stupid bugger had switched to a repayment mortgage as soon as he could afford to do so, he would have paid most of the mortgage off by now.
He's probably got a notional capital gain of over a million as well.
Just checked the ULEZ compliance of my household's current and former vehicles.
Our petrol cars going back to 2007 and our 2015 diesel are all ULEZ compliant. All the older cars back to the 1990s, sadly, don't show up, which I guess means they've been scrapped.
How many non compliant cars are there actually?
About 150k-200k such cars travel into the zone per day currently. Over a year it is about 700k cars that would have to pay at least once.
Presumably a fairly large proportion of those vehicles (not just cars I assume) are from outside London, where air pollution is much less of a problem? Ergo they are importing particulates into the capital for us to suck up then returning to their homes in cleaner air?
To coin a cliche, I would find it hard to craft a sufficiently tiny violin.
Fox Jr had asthma as a child. It disappeared immediately after we moved out of the city. Leicester is particularly bad for car fumes as away from the sea and in a shallow bowl.
Air pollution is a killer, and not just in children:
I had coughing problems when younger - they stopped when I no longer lived in a house with carpets.
Were those carpets forced on you by passing commuters? No matter how hard you tried to get rid of them, you'd wake of a morning and find that carpets had come in through the vents, under the front door. You couldn't leave the window open of a summer for fear a rug would insinuate itself into your room. You would go outside to hang the washing out, and come back in to find a throw draped across your sofa and a drape thrown across your window. A pile of mats lurking near the dining room table. Weaves and tapestries bristling their way up your stairs at night.
No, they were forced on me by my parents who have always had carpets as did almost everyone else when I was young.
I'm not belittling air pollution which is an important issue.
And not just in this country.
Would you support tariffs on imports from countries with air pollutions problems far greater than this country ?
I have long advocated that imports should be taxed with a carbon tariff reflecting the Co2 produced in manufacturing and importing goods. I agree a tariff for other major pollutants is probably a worthwhile addition.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
If he's 68 and it "holds three generations of his family", why isn't he charging generations 2 and 3 enough rent to cover it?
Just realised that may include the generation above. In which case kudos for looking after his parent(s). Even so. He's got a freeloading generation below. If he's retired, aren't his kid(s) earning? They may not be able to. In which case, he ought to have thought of that and reined it in a bit.
Would it make any particular difference if Shakespeare was an invention and Marlowe had written all the plays? I'm not sure you can hang the foundations of Empire onto that.
There are people who will tell you that the medieval church made a mistake in counting years, and there's an extra century that's been snuck in, and such fantastical conjectures are possible because the documentary evidence is sparse, and there are large gaps. I think people are asking for an impossible standard of proof when they point at certain gaps in the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's career. There are well-founded reasons to think that certain items in the canon perhaps ought not to be there, it is fuzzy around the edges, but it's an incredible stretch to imagine that it's all invention.
Yes this is my view, the conventional view on Shakespeare is probably right, even highly likely to be right. But I think it's interesting to delve into why it matters so much for people. As indeed it does for me, I am a worshipper at the cult of Shakespeare as much as anyone.
It’s an interesting question, and relates in fact to the chat upthread on where you draw the line between artist and work. My immediate thought on the authorship debate was ‘well, does it matter? We have these wonderful plays.’ But that isn’t consistent with my unease listening to Michael Jackson or watching Polanski films*. What if the ‘real’ Shakespeare was a murderous monster? Does it matter now? I don’t know. How would we feel if, say, Ian McEwan** had been posting Anthrax to vaccine labs, or joining Wagner and setting up IEDs around Fitzroy Square?
*probably a bad example given how collaborative cinema is
**I’m not particularly an Ian McEwan fan, and not-not one either. He’s just one of the most prominent writers and the image of him going rogue tickled me.
Just checked the ULEZ compliance of my household's current and former vehicles.
Our petrol cars going back to 2007 and our 2015 diesel are all ULEZ compliant. All the older cars back to the 1990s, sadly, don't show up, which I guess means they've been scrapped.
How many non compliant cars are there actually?
About 150k-200k such cars travel into the zone per day currently. Over a year it is about 700k cars that would have to pay at least once.
Presumably a fairly large proportion of those vehicles (not just cars I assume) are from outside London, where air pollution is much less of a problem? Ergo they are importing particulates into the capital for us to suck up then returning to their homes in cleaner air?
To coin a cliche, I would find it hard to craft a sufficiently tiny violin.
Fox Jr had asthma as a child. It disappeared immediately after we moved out of the city. Leicester is particularly bad for car fumes as away from the sea and in a shallow bowl.
Air pollution is a killer, and not just in children:
I had coughing problems when younger - they stopped when I no longer lived in a house with carpets.
Were those carpets forced on you by passing commuters? No matter how hard you tried to get rid of them, you'd wake of a morning and find that carpets had come in through the vents, under the front door. You couldn't leave the window open of a summer for fear a rug would insinuate itself into your room. You would go outside to hang the washing out, and come back in to find a throw draped across your sofa and a drape thrown across your window. A pile of mats lurking near the dining room table. Weaves and tapestries bristling their way up your stairs at night.
No, they were forced on me by my parents who have always had carpets as did almost everyone else when I was young.
I'm not belittling air pollution which is an important issue.
And not just in this country.
Would you support tariffs on imports from countries with air pollutions problems far greater than this country ?
Some air pollution is more local in effect, so the hypothetical country is already carrying the cost of that. Some air pollution is more global in effect, as notably with greenhouse gases. There, yes, I would support tariffs on imports from countries with more pollution, while noting that tariffs are a complex topic and there are many other factors at play.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
"Any money received from the scheme is reinvested into running and improving London's transport network." - TfL letter we received last week.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
"Any money received from the scheme is reinvested into running and improving London's transport network." - TfL letter we received last week.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Just wondering, why aren't you deducting the sunk costs from the profit figure?
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
Just checked the ULEZ compliance of my household's current and former vehicles.
Our petrol cars going back to 2007 and our 2015 diesel are all ULEZ compliant. All the older cars back to the 1990s, sadly, don't show up, which I guess means they've been scrapped.
How many non compliant cars are there actually?
About 150k-200k such cars travel into the zone per day currently. Over a year it is about 700k cars that would have to pay at least once.
- 691k cars registered to London addresses that do not meet ULEZ - 160k non ULEZ compliant vans and commercials registered in London - This represents 9.5% of vehicles registered in London, although the figure is estimated around 15% for outer London - The general cut off is 2006 for petrol cars, 2015 for diesels (a couple of the vehicles I checked squeaked in) - Estimate 160k non ULEZ cars currently drive in the extended zone each day. - A 2k scrappage scheme operates.
Sunil and his Mum are being forced to think about what they do here, but the range of possible solutions does look quite broad.
Those are the goalposts now. But in 5 years time, will diesels have been banned altogether? And how long before 2015 becomes the cut off for petrol cars too? So be careful what choices you make now, because I bet you won't retrospectively get a chance to amend them when the rules are next changed.
The problem with schemes such as the ULEZ are their retrospective nature. It amounts to retrospective taxation of a decision made in the past. That could have been avoided if the scheme had been initially set up to penalise only those motorists who registered as the owner of a non-compliant vehicle after the point when the ULEZ was announced, allowing a much longer window of say 5 years before the scheme was extended to all owners of non-compliant vehicles, giving an adequate window to amend past choices. But to set up the ULEZ thus would have generated only a tiny fraction of the initial revenue.
Also, it's not so long ago that diesel cars were being promoted as an environmentally friendly option, because (by virtue of their far greater fuel efficiency) they did and still do generate a lot less CO2 than the equivalent petrol driven car. And while the act of disposing of a 2010 Volvo diesel in favour of a brand new swanky all mod cons electric or hybrid vehicle might appeal to those who like to do a lot of virtue signalling, the resources consumed in the act of prematurely manufacturing that new vehicle will also generate a huge amount of additional CO2. Hanging on to a reliable old but fuel efficient diesel is still a pretty good environmental choice if you see global warming as the greater threat.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
No.
You can certainly drive through the middle of the city more easily in Birmingham.
Yes but. Driving through the middle of Birmingham takes plenty people plenty places folk want to go. From the northwest to London and vice versa. If there were any two sizeable conurbations either side of London I reckon you'd be able to zoom through it.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house bought for that in 2003 would probably sell for 2-3 times that sum now, even with the latest downturn in prices. A very effective use of gearing, and if he sits out the market downturn in a rental for a couple of years, may well be able to buy similarly with his equity. Luvvly jubbly.
How do they seem to find these 'examples' exclusively when much better ones must exist?
Nothing new so far, but man alive, a Foreign Secretary attending the home of a KGB official (former or current) almost immediately after the Salisbury poisonings.
Not being a Londoner or someone who travels to it more than every couple of years, I can only assume all this attention on ULEZ is because:
a) It truly is a terrible policy b) It is a decent policy, but there is political mileage in going after it, or c) It hits journalists particularly hard somehow.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Phantom Thread is on BBC2 tonight. Is it worth watching? I haven't watched a film on TV for ages.
Hopefully it’ll be on iPlayer - they often have a surprisingly good selection of films on there. Not huge, but generally good quality. At the moment (from a twenty second glance) there’s Whisky Galore, The Deer Hunter, Eastern Promises, both Paddington films, Dunkirk, The Exorcist, Guys & Dolls and The Death of Stalin among plenty of others.
Nothing new so far, but man alive, a Foreign Secretary attending the home of a KGB official (former or current) almost immediately after the Salisbury poisonings.
I should think there was an entire contingent of officials on honey trap watch.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
If they think they are having a bad time they should houseshare with that Question Time chap who thinks he earns less than 50% of the country on £80k, share the pain.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
My rent in Edinburgh, for a three-bedroom flat, was £710 per month, and for a similar amount he was able to pay interest on a huge house in Wimbledon! Oh my days.
If the stupid bugger had switched to a repayment mortgage as soon as he could afford to do so, he would have paid most of the mortgage off by now.
He's probably got a notional capital gain of over a million as well.
He’ll be even more upset if the CGT exemption for your own home is removed.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
There was some polling in the affected areas a few weeks ago.
Bizarrely more popular in London than the rest of the country.
That doesn’t strike me as bizarre at all, given that it’s those who live in London who will benefit most from the cleaner air. And let’s not beat about the bush - that means live longer and be less prone to chronic disease.
What I mean is why should the rest of the country care? Are they all planning on driving their beaten up old jalopies here and zooming around the north circular?
Yes a lot of people who live outside London might drive into the zone a couple of times a year. I'd imagine a high proportion of those are going to be hit with unexpected £80/160 fines.
Again it would have been better to say something like first five journeys per year are free.
Why? Every journey in a dirty car is filling some kid's lungs with filth. There are massive signs when you enter the zone so it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who drives with their eyes open. Nobody has a God-given right to pollute other people's lungs. If they don't want to pay the charge, just stay the fuck away.
Lots of reasons.
Paying £80-160 is too big a fine for lack of knowledge/forgotfulness/getting lost, especially without the deterrent effect needed for regular users. Someone visiting London a couple of times a year really isn't a big contributor to London pollution. London is a great and welcoming city, we don't need to put off occassional visitors. It is unreasonable to expect someone visiting a couple of times a year to change car unlike someone using the roads every day. It would be a progressive part of a regressive scheme financially.
Truthfully, I think anyone who visits London a couple of times a year by car is mad.
Much better to drive to a nice convenient station and catch a train.
Edit - and I'm not totally sure I'd limit the madness to those who only visit a couple of times a year. Horrible place to drive.
Exactly. Lots of Wembley visitors might park in Ruislip and get the train from there to Wembley.
Problem - Ruislip in the new ULEZ zone.
So park at Haddenham instead.
Haddenham? Why not just park in Birmingham?
That would mean driving in Birmingham. Even shittier experience than driving in London.
Aren't the roads in Birmingham rather easier to drive around than in London?
No.
You can certainly drive through the middle of the city more easily in Birmingham.
Yes but. Driving through the middle of Birmingham takes plenty people plenty places folk want to go. From the northwest to London and vice versa. If there were any two sizeable conurbations either side of London I reckon you'd be able to zoom through it.
Well here in the West Midlands there's a big incentive that encourages people to drive through the centre of the conurbation rather than saving time by by passing it.
Nothing new so far, but man alive, a Foreign Secretary attending the home of a KGB official (former or current) almost immediately after the Salisbury poisonings.
I should think there was an entire contingent of officials on honey trap watch.
With Boris Johnson they'd be 24/7 shift work. Hope they negotiated overtime too.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
On this point I do actually have sympathy. The whole stop start approach with schools seemed like it must have been very damaging.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
"Any money received from the scheme is reinvested into running and improving London's transport network." - TfL letter we received last week.
This was a surprise?
Revenue earning excercise. If pre-2015 diesels are SO ee-vil, they should have been banned, surely?
In my humble and limited experience driving in UK and Ireland, did my level best to stay away from major conurbations as much as possible. Found driving out and back from Heathrow one trip, and from/to Edgeware MORE than sufficiently challenging.
And I'm someone whose driven plenty of major US metros, about only place I was not eager to vehicluate being Manhattan.
Scariest driving for me was one weekday morning from Windsor to Edgeware. Traffic was atrocious, and the funky (for me anyway) mangle-tangle of the road "grid" did NOT help. Along with custom of changing the name of nearly every thoroughfare every quarter-mile or sooner.
Round-a-bouts didn't phase me much, nor driving on wrong side of road. Though re: the latter, found that, whenever I got into my (rental) car, even though I was sitting on the right, had to take a beat and remind myself that it was imperative to drive on the LEFT side of whatever road there was.
Or my muscle memory would make me zoom out of the parking lot or wherever, right onto the right side of road. NOT GOOD. Found this out, appropriately enough, in Muff, Ireland.
In my humble and limited experience driving in UK and Ireland, did my level best to stay away from major conurbations as much as possible. Found driving out and back from Heathrow one trip, and from/to Edgeware MORE than sufficiently challenging.
And I'm someone whose driven plenty of major US metros, about only place I was not eager to vehicluate being Manhattan.
Scariest driving for me was one weekday morning from Windsor to Edgeware. Traffic was atrocious, and the funky (for me anyway) mangle-tangle of the road "grid" did NOT help. Along with custom of changing the name of nearly every thoroughfare every quarter-mile or sooner.
Round-a-bouts didn't phase me much, nor driving on wrong side of road. Though re: the latter, found that, whenever I got into my (rental) car, even though I was sitting on the right, had to take a beat and remind myself that it was imperative to drive on the LEFT side of whatever road there was.
Or my muscle memory would make me zoom out of the parking lot or wherever, right onto the right side of road. NOT GOOD. Found this out, appropriately enough, in Muff, Ireland.
Not being a Londoner or someone who travels to it more than every couple of years, I can only assume all this attention on ULEZ is because:
a) It truly is a terrible policy b) It is a decent policy, but there is political mileage in going after it, or c) It hits journalists particularly hard somehow.
There’s not actually that much media focus on it. And the Evening Standard is supportive of it. I’ve heard far more about it on PB than IRL.
Had some really dispiriting conversations with apprentices, in my former role, shortly before Covid, about where they saw themselves age 35? Quite a few, unprompted, said "retired, owning and renting out three or four properties and using the rent to buy more." That was the scale of their ambition. That's gone. For which, much thanks.
Nothing new so far, but man alive, a Foreign Secretary attending the home of a KGB official (former or current) almost immediately after the Salisbury poisonings.
I should think there was an entire contingent of officials on honey trap watch.
With Boris Johnson they'd be 24/7 shift work. Hope they negotiated overtime too.
It felt like savvy diplomacy when a delegation of Ukrainian MPs came to visit Boris in No. 10, all women. Probably for good reasons, men not permitted to leave at the time maybe, no exceptions for MPs perhaps. Still, in terms of making him want to feel more charming and accomodating.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Where in that story does the guy demand a handout? Indeed, it’s impossible to infer he’s “wallowing in self-pity” either.
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
"Any money received from the scheme is reinvested into running and improving London's transport network." - TfL letter we received last week.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Just wondering, why aren't you deducting the sunk costs from the profit figure?
Not to answer for Viewcode, but the money would otherwise have had to be spent on rent.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
"survive OK".
4000 (official), more like 10-15K, dead, and hundreds of thousands injured in one episode of fog.
Even 10 years ago, there was no emissions crisis, and without looking at the figures, I strongly suspect air pollution levels in the capital are lower than they were a decade ago and falling.
It is purely a revenue-earning exercise. They even fess up to it in the letter TfL sent us last week!
Citation required.
They would have sent you the same letter if your car's not "compliant".
But my car is compliant. So they didn’t. Why I bought it I ensured it was compliant.
If you feel so strongly about "clean air", you can always buy my mum a new car
There is a scrappage scheme, so to a certain extent tax-paying London residents are contributing to helping to buy your mum a new car, were she to avail of the scrappage scheme to do so.
Only a minority of Londoners are eligible for scrappage, however.
True story: friend of mine proudly got his Irish/EU passport. Thereby hoping to avoid the awful Brexity queues into the EU. First flight into Malaga last month. Met a horrible 1hr+ passport EU queue. Wife and daughter with UK passports sailed through in minutes. 🤷♂️🍷🤷♂️
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
Well, yes... up to a point. If the government replaces tax revenue from tax on income with tax revenue from a tax on pollution, then the public finances are screwed if everyone responds to the tax signal and stops polluting.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
"Any money received from the scheme is reinvested into running and improving London's transport network." - TfL letter we received last week.
This was a surprise?
Revenue earning excercise. If pre-2015 diesels are SO ee-vil, they should have been banned, surely?
Probably, if being severe. Same with cigarettes, though the link is I presume less direct than that. But policy makers don't really see the downside in people voluntarily choose to get squeezed by disincentive taxes.
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
I would rather fair and low taxes in each area.
You seem to have a particular personal aversion to anything environmental. It’s more like the opinions of the US right than anything British.
Of course I don't. Who wouldn't want a clean, healthy, beautiful world that allows all its species to thrive? We should be good stewards of creation.
But I'm also conscious that much of what comes under a green heading these days isn't actually about green, it's about control over the individual.
I'd never give a quote for a journalist to make use of in an article outside some formal professional capacity. I just know I'd reveal myself to be an out of touch tit in a way I could never have anticipated.
True story: friend of mine proudly got his Irish/EU passport. Thereby hoping to avoid the awful Brexity queues into the EU. First flight into Malaga last month. Met a horrible 1hr+ passport EU queue. Wife and daughter with UK passports sailed through in minutes. 🤷♂️🍷🤷♂️
I wouldn't have thought the Cons have given up on Grimsby or Stockton South yet. However, the likely battleground at the GE will be far far beyond most of these forty constituencies. Little in politics is certain but that is about as close to it as you can get!
Tory over performing areas probably midlands and poorer outer London/M25 fringe playing on ULEZ. Shafted elsewhere though and hard to see much recovery within 18 months.
The Ulez-X will have been in force over a year by the likely time of the GE. In all likelihood, people will have come to terms with it by then.
I’m far from sure that the Ulez play is the big vote winning the Tories think it is.
Yes, I’d like to see some polling on ULEZ.
Personally, I live in Zone 3 and am a big supporter of it. It’s the one thing Khan has done that I can get behind enthusiastically. That’s because it’s proven to reduce pollution and I’m very much in favour of cleaner air. But maybe I’m just unusual in that, and outer Londoners want to continue to live in an asthma inducing smog so long as it means they can keep their diesel Volvo Estate?
Close! We're in Zone 4, and we've got a diesel Volvo saloon :
So, does that mean you’re anti?
Yes, we got a letter from TfL via the DVLA explaining what's happening in August - it openly admits ULEZ is a revenue-earning exercise "to fund public transport". I mean £12.50 a DAY?
24 hours a day seven days a week as well. Should have started at £5 a day for outer London and only 7-7 when congestion is a problem.
Why? It’s been operating fine inside the North Circular for years. London needs cleaner air. You don’t get something for nothing.
Why does London *need* cleaner air than is growingly already the case? It seemed to survive OK when it had air thick with soot. Petrol and diesel cars are on the way out, and cars at any rate are pensioned off and their replacements ever cleaner and more efficient. This is just yet another confected crisis to get people to sacrifice freedoms that they wouldn't otherwise be prepared to.
There are clearly negative health outcomes from breathing in diesel particulates, particulates on the tube, ozone/NO2/CO from car engines etc.
I don't think anyone denies that. It's going to be a part of the reason why the incidence of lung diseases in children are 2-3x higher in urban that in rural areas.
Now, we can argue about cost-benefit, if you like, but I don't think many people would suggest it's *good* to breathe in pollution.
I am not saying that it is good to inhale polluted air frequently. I am making the argument that this is an unjust infringement of personal liberty, and that, along with most unjust infringements of liberty these days, we're morally blackmailed with a 'crisis' whereby opponents of the policy are 'happy with children dying'. Yet when we look at the actual impact of (for example) covid lockdowns and school closures, they were far more disastrous for children than non-implementation would have been.
I'd much rather the government taxed something we want less of (like pollution), than something we want more of (like work), wouldn't you?
I would rather fair and low taxes in each area.
You seem to have a particular personal aversion to anything environmental. It’s more like the opinions of the US right than anything British.
Of course I don't. Who wouldn't want a clean, healthy, beautiful world that allows all its species to thrive? We should be good stewards of creation.
But I'm also conscious that much of what comes under a green heading these days isn't actually about green, it's about control over the individual.
Whilst I'm generally in favour of such developments anyway, it has been fun to see people who would normally back things like solar farms wholeheartedly objecting strenuously in their own backyards, suddenly discovering arguments of nuance, factoring in other concerns, that there are associated impacts etc.
Turns out only then is there more of a debate to be had even if it is proposed as a green solution.
Phantom Thread is on BBC2 tonight. Is it worth watching? I haven't watched a film on TV for ages.
The ending has a surprise twist, and not one I liked. It's a good performance by DDL and a great one by Vicky Krieps, and it's a really good evocation of a period and a style, but it does go orthogonal.
In my humble and limited experience driving in UK and Ireland, did my level best to stay away from major conurbations as much as possible. Found driving out and back from Heathrow one trip, and from/to Edgeware MORE than sufficiently challenging.
And I'm someone whose driven plenty of major US metros, about only place I was not eager to vehicluate being Manhattan.
Scariest driving for me was one weekday morning from Windsor to Edgeware. Traffic was atrocious, and the funky (for me anyway) mangle-tangle of the road "grid" did NOT help. Along with custom of changing the name of nearly every thoroughfare every quarter-mile or sooner.
Round-a-bouts didn't phase me much, nor driving on wrong side of road. Though re: the latter, found that, whenever I got into my (rental) car, even though I was sitting on the right, had to take a beat and remind myself that it was imperative to drive on the LEFT side of whatever road there was.
Or my muscle memory would make me zoom out of the parking lot or wherever, right onto the right side of road. NOT GOOD. Found this out, appropriately enough, in Muff, Ireland.
We Brits have more experience than most of that sort of thing, being surrounded by neighbours who drive on the 'wrong' side of the road. But yes, I agree - it's actually easy enough when you're in traffic - but as soon as you're on your own, your hands and eyes want to take you back to the 'right' side.
I think driving in North America is significantly easier than driving in the UK. Yes, the grid system of cities make it impossible to get lost, but the bigger factor is the wide roads and the sheer pleasantness of the other drivers. Far less competitive than in the UK. I put it down to the acres of space you have.
But have you ever driven in Italy? Off the Autostrada, roads are usually only as wide as two cars + 1 inch, and the buildings on either side of them are scarred by decades of truck collisions. Roughly 75% of traffic on the road at any one time is engaged in some sort of overtaking maneuver. And drivers in Italian cities tend to the homicidal. Driving in Italy is an exhausting experience.
POSITION STATEMENT regarding GE 2024 v. London 2024
I wish to reinsure my squad of Ultimate PB Labour Fans that this ULEZ business mentioned up-thread will NOT alter or diminish my enthusiasm for my "Keep Calmer and Vote Starmer" meme symbolised by my avatar!
While I would quite likely NOT vote for Khan in the Mayoral election (I may just sit on my hands, as opposed to actually voting Tory!), I will vote for Streeting for Ilford North MP at the General Election, maximising Labour's chances of ending 13 (or 14 by next year!) years of Tory mis-rule!
Had some really dispiriting conversations with apprentices, in my former role, shortly before Covid, about where they saw themselves age 35? Quite a few, unprompted, said "retired, owning and renting out three or four properties and using the rent to buy more." That was the scale of their ambition. That's gone. For which, much thanks.
I'm slightly older than that and still don't own any property, but I'm not complaining about it.
True story: friend of mine proudly got his Irish/EU passport. Thereby hoping to avoid the awful Brexity queues into the EU. First flight into Malaga last month. Met a horrible 1hr+ passport EU queue. Wife and daughter with UK passports sailed through in minutes. 🤷♂️🍷🤷♂️
You might remind him that the "non EU" queue is actually the "all passports" queue, and he can join it.
At Malta, there are five non-EU gates and one EU gate. Maltese citizens just line up in whichever line seems shorter.
American comedian Roseanne Barr has been criticised for a podcast interview in which she said that six million Jews 'should be killed.'
In a conversation with provocative comedian Theo Von, Barr, 70, said the Holocaust never happened, "but should have" as "Jews cause all the problems in the world."
I mean I’m not generally in favour of cancelling people for what they say, but in what world could that possibly be remotely acceptable?
America.
Remember Trump fans chant 'Jews will not replace us.'
T.S. Eliot, in 1946, said the holocaust was all very well but if the jews kept breeding we were only a couple of generations away from having exactly the same problems as it was meant to solve. I wish I could say that this exposes the essential worthlessness of The Waste Land and 4 Quartets, but it doesn't. But I have a real ethical dilemma, is it still right to read him?
Here's a little tip for you to help answer your question. You aren't reading him, you're reading his work.
Reading someone's work doesn't endorse what they are saying in that work, let alone the wider life of the author. Knowing what you know might affect your enjoyment, but that's not a "should" question.
He, of course, can no longer benefit from sales of his work so your conscience ought to be free from any troubling questions along those lines too.
Does that mean it's ok to rewatch "Jim'll Fix It" now? Because I have some fond childhood memories which are terribly conflicted.
I get the point, but there is a bit of a balancing act between the badness of the behaviour and the merit of the work (with perhaps an element of time passing moderating the former). Kanye straddles it; Michael Jackson *maybe* does too; phenomenal musician, but… and then you’ve got the likes of Gary Glitter or Lostprophets, who nobody misses.
There are some tricky ones - Lewis Carroll is one I struggle with. I have zero doubt he was a paedophile, even if he was chaste. But Alice stands in the pantheon of literature.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Just wondering, why aren't you deducting the sunk costs from the profit figure?
Not to answer for Viewcode, but the money would otherwise have had to be spent on rent.
Yes. I figured if I displayed the figures people could deduct for themselves if they felt it necessary.
True story: friend of mine proudly got his Irish/EU passport. Thereby hoping to avoid the awful Brexity queues into the EU. First flight into Malaga last month. Met a horrible 1hr+ passport EU queue. Wife and daughter with UK passports sailed through in minutes. 🤷♂️🍷🤷♂️
Sadly, I have an opposite story.
Landed at Cancun airport last Monday. Signs for the machines said "US / Canada / Mexico / UK" citizens.
Yes! I thought, I can skip the 25 person queue for the an agent.
Got into queue for machines. Got to the front. Discovered that the sign was a lie. And that UK passports are not acceptable for the machines.
Of course, I didn't find this out until I'd spent ten minutes trying to get the machine to work. And a bored official said "No UK. Only America and Mexico citizen. Must use other line."
And that I was now behind 250 or 300 passengers, thanks to the arrival of a Tui flight from wherever.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Where in that story does the guy demand a handout? Indeed, it’s impossible to infer he’s “wallowing in self-pity” either.
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
Given that he thinks he's got 'losses' when he's likely got a capital gain of over a million then it does seem to me he's wallowing in self pity.
And given the damage property greed has done to this country and the further damage any sort of subsidy would cause then I'm quite willing to 'strike first' at anything which might be sympathetic to such an idea.
POSITION STATEMENT regarding GE 2024 v. London 2024
I wish to reinsure my squad of Ultimate PB Labour Fans that this ULEZ business mentioned up-thread will NOT alter or diminish my enthusiasm for my "Keep Calmer and Vote Starmer" meme symbolised by my avatar!
While I would quite likely NOT vote for Khan in the Mayoral election (I may just sit on my hands, as opposed to actually voting Tory!), I will vote for Streeting for Ilford North MP at the General Election, maximising Labour's chances of ending 13 (or 14 by next year!) years of Tory mis-rule!
Thank you!
(And relax!)
But Sunil, you spelt "Khan" with less than ten letters. I shall throw you out of Team Shatner. 😀
More anecdata: went to see the Hockney Lightroom Exhibition in King's X tonight. Dinner with friends after. On a Tuesday night, thought we'd be able to walk in to anywhere we liked. No way. All the best restaurants in Coal Drops Yard, and around, were jammers. Whole place rammed
I remember when Coal Drops Yard (a marvellous bit of industrial reimagining by Thomas Hetherington) was regarded as a fool's errand. Bound to fail. Terrible connections. "Walk the canal from Camden!?" Now it throbs with new life. Congrats to all. An old corner of London THRIVES
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Where in that story does the guy demand a handout? Indeed, it’s impossible to infer he’s “wallowing in self-pity” either.
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
Given that he thinks he's got 'losses' when he's likely got a capital gain of over a million then it does seem to me he's wallowing in self pity.
And given the damage property greed has done to this country and the further damage any sort of subsidy would cause then I'm quite willing to 'strike first' at anything which might be sympathetic to such an idea.
So to be clear, you accept he hasn’t demanded a handout, you just made that bit up.
And that he is ‘wallowing in self pity’ is your inference and a stretch at best.
I mean, I think his choices were wacky too (to my mind interest-only mortgages are inherently unsound), but just sneering at him and others with convenient assumptions really doesn’t help your argument.
In my humble and limited experience driving in UK and Ireland, did my level best to stay away from major conurbations as much as possible. Found driving out and back from Heathrow one trip, and from/to Edgeware MORE than sufficiently challenging.
And I'm someone whose driven plenty of major US metros, about only place I was not eager to vehicluate being Manhattan.
Scariest driving for me was one weekday morning from Windsor to Edgeware. Traffic was atrocious, and the funky (for me anyway) mangle-tangle of the road "grid" did NOT help. Along with custom of changing the name of nearly every thoroughfare every quarter-mile or sooner.
Round-a-bouts didn't phase me much, nor driving on wrong side of road. Though re: the latter, found that, whenever I got into my (rental) car, even though I was sitting on the right, had to take a beat and remind myself that it was imperative to drive on the LEFT side of whatever road there was.
Or my muscle memory would make me zoom out of the parking lot or wherever, right onto the right side of road. NOT GOOD. Found this out, appropriately enough, in Muff, Ireland.
Driving almost anywhere in europe is 18,000 times harder than driving in the USA. No wonder American toursits are so pussy about doing it
Moreover, I have personally driven right across Budapest during a monsoon, across Yereven Armenia during rush hour (after an 8 day roadtrip around Armenia), around Naples at sunset, over Calabria for a week, and all the way across northen Thailand for two weeks, cities and jungle
IF you can do that you can drive anywhere. And, basically, I have
Phantom Thread is on BBC2 tonight. Is it worth watching? I haven't watched a film on TV for ages.
a really interesting and even sado-masochistic turn to it. Magnificent costumes too.
Enough about the Tory party in power from 2019-2023.
When was the last time we had a really well-dressed MP? Male or female? I'm not expecting Ascot hats, just something really well tailored and stylish?
I have this suspicion that political strategists in party headquarters advise all MPs to dress professionally (unless they want to performatively make a point), so get a decently fit suit Mr Corbyn etc, but not to look too well dressed and flashy, lest you look posh and out of touch. People lost their shit enough over Rishi's skinny fit short trouser legs.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Where in that story does the guy demand a handout? Indeed, it’s impossible to infer he’s “wallowing in self-pity” either.
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
Given that he thinks he's got 'losses' when he's likely got a capital gain of over a million then it does seem to me he's wallowing in self pity.
And given the damage property greed has done to this country and the further damage any sort of subsidy would cause then I'm quite willing to 'strike first' at anything which might be sympathetic to such an idea.
So to be clear, you accept he hasn’t demanded a handout, you just made that bit up.
And that he is ‘wallowing in self pity’ is your inference and a stretch at best.
I mean, I think his choices were wacky too (to my mind interest-only mortgages are inherently unsound), but just sneering at him and others with convenient assumptions really doesn’t help your argument.
My sneer is reserved for the journalist thinking this was the best way to illustrate the point they presumably wanted to make.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
A house purchased in 2003 for £850,000 will now sell for about £2 to 2.5million, a profit of around £1.3 to £1.7milion, for sunk costs of around £180,000 in interest payments.
Indeed.
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
Where in that story does the guy demand a handout? Indeed, it’s impossible to infer he’s “wallowing in self-pity” either.
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
Given that he thinks he's got 'losses' when he's likely got a capital gain of over a million then it does seem to me he's wallowing in self pity.
And given the damage property greed has done to this country and the further damage any sort of subsidy would cause then I'm quite willing to 'strike first' at anything which might be sympathetic to such an idea.
So to be clear, you accept he hasn’t demanded a handout, you just made that bit up.
And that he is ‘wallowing in self pity’ is your inference and a stretch at best.
I mean, I think his choices were wacky too (to my mind interest-only mortgages are inherently unsound), but just sneering at him and others with convenient assumptions really doesn’t help your argument.
My sneer is reserved for the journalist thinking this was the best way to illustrate the point they presumably wanted to make.
Yes, that’s fair enough. It’s a really bad example as highly atypical. There are plenty of ‘good’ (bad) examples out there.
I'm not sure if its a parody or not - it features a 'sun kissed' mortgage advisor called Tarquin plus this whiner:
Over in Wimbledon, a retired academic, Gareth Tudor-Williams, 68, was thankful for two decades on an interest-only mortgage; it enabled him to buy a five-bedroom house, which now holds three generations of his family, for £850,000 in 2003. He was paying £770 a month. Now, his payments are £2,700 — still on an interest-only basis — and set to rise further. “It’s utterly unsustainable for us. We’re eroding savings we hadn’t expected to use so early into retirement. We’re considering whether to sell up and count our losses.”
£770 pcm for an £850k house?
I was paying more than that on my rent on a house worth about a fifth of that.
20 years into a mortgage the property should be all but paid off by now.
POSITION STATEMENT regarding GE 2024 v. London 2024
I wish to reinsure my squad of Ultimate PB Labour Fans that this ULEZ business mentioned up-thread will NOT alter or diminish my enthusiasm for my "Keep Calmer and Vote Starmer" meme symbolised by my avatar!
While I would quite likely NOT vote for Khan in the Mayoral election (I may just sit on my hands, as opposed to actually voting Tory!), I will vote for Streeting for Ilford North MP at the General Election, maximising Labour's chances of ending 13 (or 14 by next year!) years of Tory mis-rule!
Thank you!
(And relax!)
But Sunil, you spelt "Khan" with less than ten letters. I shall throw you out of Team Shatner. 😀
Comments
There are people who will tell you that the medieval church made a mistake in counting years, and there's an extra century that's been snuck in, and such fantastical conjectures are possible because the documentary evidence is sparse, and there are large gaps. I think people are asking for an impossible standard of proof when they point at certain gaps in the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's career. There are well-founded reasons to think that certain items in the canon perhaps ought not to be there, it is fuzzy around the edges, but it's an incredible stretch to imagine that it's all invention.
If the stupid bugger had switched to a repayment mortgage as soon as he could afford to do so, he would have paid most of the mortgage off by now.
Later phases will be about what actually happened during the pandemic. There’s way more to come.
Not that Truss herself could have turned it around, but political leaders have seen big volatility in ratings in the past and tended to be able to bounce back more easily from short sharp plunges than slower drawn out ones. Thatcher bumped around a lot in her early years but clawed it back. Blair’s Labour had a few rapid drops, like during the lorry driver strike. Johnson had volatile ratings early on. But the ones who drifted slowly downwards after reasonable peaks never seemed to be able to reverse the trend. Major, Blair after around 2003/4, Ed Miliband, Johnson himself in a slightly more ratcheted way each time a new indignity came along.
I mean what does Sunak do to get back up there? The voters have the measure of this front bench now. He might he able to level off Tory fortunes a bit, but his only other hope must be for Labour to cock up big time between now and the election.
Ideally "sin" taxes such as taxes on pollution, or on tobacco, carbon, etc, should all be used on spending for alternatives that you can easily cut if the income from those taxes drops to nothing - e.g. income from carbon taxes would be better spent on solar panels than on health services.
One story to look out for in a few years time is the Mayor of London facing problems balancing their budget, because people switched to cleaner cars more quickly than forecast, and so the ULEZ doesn't raise as much money as expected.
Strangely enough, Jewish people CAN be anti-Semitic. RB not only example, by long shot.
I'm not belittling air pollution which is an important issue.
And not just in this country.
Would you support tariffs on imports from countries with air pollutions problems far greater than this country ?
I was paying more than that on my rent on a house worth about a fifth of that.
20 years into a mortgage the property should be all but paid off by now.
Even so. He's got a freeloading generation below. If he's retired, aren't his kid(s) earning?
They may not be able to. In which case, he ought to have thought of that and reined it in a bit.
*probably a bad example given how collaborative cinema is
**I’m not particularly an Ian McEwan fan, and not-not one either. He’s just one of the most prominent writers and the image of him going rogue tickled me.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/06/27/dame-ann-leslie-obituary-daily-mail-fleet-street-war/
The problem with schemes such as the ULEZ are their retrospective nature. It amounts to retrospective taxation of a decision made in the past. That could have been avoided if the scheme had been initially set up to penalise only those motorists who registered as the owner of a non-compliant vehicle after the point when the ULEZ was announced, allowing a much longer window of say 5 years before the scheme was extended to all owners of non-compliant vehicles, giving an adequate window to amend past choices. But to set up the ULEZ thus would have generated only a tiny fraction of the initial revenue.
Also, it's not so long ago that diesel cars were being promoted as an environmentally friendly option, because (by virtue of their far greater fuel efficiency) they did and still do generate a lot less CO2 than the equivalent petrol driven car. And while the act of disposing of a 2010 Volvo diesel in favour of a brand new swanky all mod cons electric or hybrid vehicle might appeal to those who like to do a lot of virtue signalling, the resources consumed in the act of prematurely manufacturing that new vehicle will also generate a huge amount of additional CO2. Hanging on to a reliable old but fuel efficient diesel is still a pretty good environmental choice if you see global warming as the greater threat.
Driving through the middle of Birmingham takes plenty people plenty places folk want to go.
From the northwest to London and vice versa.
If there were any two sizeable conurbations either side of London I reckon you'd be able to zoom through it.
I’m warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida. They are not welcome in the Sunshine State.
https://twitter.com/ScottforFlorida/status/1673662921652551680?s=20
Nothing new so far, but man alive, a Foreign Secretary attending the home of a KGB official (former or current) almost immediately after the Salisbury poisonings.
a) It truly is a terrible policy
b) It is a decent policy, but there is political mileage in going after it, or
c) It hits journalists particularly hard somehow.
How about Nazis?
And yet they still wallow in self-pity and think they deserve a handout.
Plus there will be those who have been renting out property and had an income stream to match their interest payments.
https://news.sky.com/story/this-is-neo-nazi-ideology-on-display-is-florida-in-danger-of-being-taken-over-by-the-far-right-12835558
It's called the M6 Toll.
And I'm someone whose driven plenty of major US metros, about only place I was not eager to vehicluate being Manhattan.
Scariest driving for me was one weekday morning from Windsor to Edgeware. Traffic was atrocious, and the funky (for me anyway) mangle-tangle of the road "grid" did NOT help. Along with custom of changing the name of nearly every thoroughfare every quarter-mile or sooner.
Round-a-bouts didn't phase me much, nor driving on wrong side of road. Though re: the latter, found that, whenever I got into my (rental) car, even though I was sitting on the right, had to take a beat and remind myself that it was imperative to drive on the LEFT side of whatever road there was.
Or my muscle memory would make me zoom out of the parking lot or wherever, right onto the right side of road. NOT GOOD. Found this out, appropriately enough, in Muff, Ireland.
supportive of it. I’ve heard far more about it on PB than IRL.
Quite a few, unprompted, said "retired, owning and renting out
three or four properties and using the rent to buy more."
That was the scale of their ambition.
That's gone.
For which, much thanks.
Honoured to meet Ukrainian MPs @lesiavasylenko, @Aly_shkrum, @mezentseva_dep, and Olena Khomenko in Downing Street today.
Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine is a clear violation of the democracy each of them represent. Ukraine's freedom & independence must be restored
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1504553928238772224?lang=en-GB
You may not approve of his choices, but most probably the journalist simply asked him a question, and he gave them an answer.
But I'm also conscious that much of what comes under a green heading these days isn't actually about green, it's about control over the individual.
Much new?
Turns out only then is there more of a debate to be had even if it is proposed as a green solution.
I think driving in North America is significantly easier than driving in the UK. Yes, the grid system of cities make it impossible to get lost, but the bigger factor is the wide roads and the sheer pleasantness of the other drivers. Far less competitive than in the UK. I put it down to the acres of space you have.
But have you ever driven in Italy? Off the Autostrada, roads are usually only as wide as two cars + 1 inch, and the buildings on either side of them are scarred by decades of truck collisions. Roughly 75% of traffic on the road at any one time is engaged in some sort of overtaking maneuver. And drivers in Italian cities tend to the homicidal. Driving in Italy is an exhausting experience.
I wish to reinsure my squad of Ultimate PB Labour Fans that this ULEZ business mentioned up-thread will NOT alter or diminish my enthusiasm for my "Keep Calmer and Vote Starmer" meme symbolised by my avatar!
While I would quite likely NOT vote for Khan in the Mayoral election (I may just sit on my hands, as opposed to actually voting Tory!), I will vote for Streeting for Ilford North MP at the General Election, maximising Labour's chances of ending 13 (or 14 by next year!) years of Tory mis-rule!
Thank you!
(And relax!)
At Malta, there are five non-EU gates and one EU gate. Maltese citizens just line up in whichever line seems shorter.
Landed at Cancun airport last Monday. Signs for the machines said "US / Canada / Mexico / UK" citizens.
Yes! I thought, I can skip the 25 person queue for the an agent.
Got into queue for machines. Got to the front. Discovered that the sign was a lie. And that UK passports are not acceptable for the machines.
Of course, I didn't find this out until I'd spent ten minutes trying to get the machine to work. And a bored official said "No UK. Only America and Mexico citizen. Must use other line."
And that I was now behind 250 or 300 passengers, thanks to the arrival of a Tui flight from wherever.
It was fair to say I was slightly grumpy.
And given the damage property greed has done to this country and the further damage any sort of subsidy would cause then I'm quite willing to 'strike first' at anything which might be sympathetic to such an idea.
I remember when Coal Drops Yard (a marvellous bit of industrial reimagining by Thomas Hetherington) was regarded as a fool's errand. Bound to fail. Terrible connections. "Walk the canal from Camden!?" Now it throbs with new life. Congrats to all. An old corner of London THRIVES
The Old City, this battered Old Smoke, she LIVES
And that he is ‘wallowing in self pity’ is your inference and a stretch at best.
I mean, I think his choices were wacky too
(to my mind interest-only mortgages are inherently unsound), but just sneering at him and others with convenient assumptions really doesn’t help your argument.
Moreover, I have personally driven right across Budapest during a monsoon, across Yereven Armenia during rush hour (after an 8 day roadtrip around Armenia), around Naples at sunset, over Calabria for a week, and all the way across northen Thailand for two weeks, cities and jungle
IF you can do that you can drive anywhere. And, basically, I have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2023_Greek_legislative_election#/media/File:2023_Greek_Legislative_Snap_Election.svg
Anyone know why part of Thrace is so left wing ?
Better?