How is it that the Conservatives have managed to miss the wide open London mayoral goal? In fact, they haven't just missed it, they have shot the ball into the stands on the far right.
They had one opportunity to pick someone sensible, attractive to the electorate, dynamic, interesting. I'm not suggesting Rory Stewart, but obviously someone of that kind of ilk who had a presence and who might galvanise moderate left voters in the way that Boris once did. They could have won this election in May, possibly with ease.
It's a measure of how disconnected the Conservative Party is becoming from power that at its moment of golden opportunity it managed to select someone so repulsively unelectable as Susan Hall.
Whom do you have in mind? Surely the problem is that the party *doesn't* have anyone with those attributes. In London or elsewhere...
George Osborne.
ROFL!
Jeremy Clarkson?
Far too divisive, reactionary, and anti-woke. He's exactly what the party needs to move away from, not towards.
You aren’t aware that the real life Clarkson is very different to the character he plays on TV? A Remainer for a start.
He cultivates an air of grumpy old-fashioned obnoxiousness, which regardless of his actual views is not likely to attract centrist London voters. But in current circs I think Jesus Christ would struggle as Tory candidate for London. Maybe their candidate is as good as any.
Anyone who spends a minute pondering Clarkson will come to the conclusion that he is in their side. Plenty won't bother spending that minute, that said.
Many moons ago, Clarkson wrote a column - perhaps better called a meta-column - about column writing. Basically, he had to write a certain number of columns a year - say, 40 - of a certain number of words. And do so for years. They also need to be entertaining and engage the paper's audience. The problem he outlined was that after a few years of this, he has covered everything. So his first part of writing is to read the week's papers, see what has engaged people and/or was controversial, and write about that in an engaging way. Hence he sometimes write columns which were directly contradicted by earlier columns he had written, and not particularly his own views at times.
It sounded quite honest, tbf, and could explain why columnists sometimes get into trouble.
Clarkson the column-writer might be a very different entity to Clarkson the celebrity, and that might be very different to Clarkson the real person.
Didn't Clarkson punch someone in the face for bringing him a cold steak? Did he do that as celebrity, a columnist or a real person, I wonder?
Did he? I knew he hit Piers Morgan, over something that I have a little sympathy with Clarkson for.
( I am saddened that Piers Morgan still has any prominence within our society. If Clarkson's bad, then Morgan's many times worse. We'd be better off without either. I wonder if Morgan's left-wing persuasion offers him some protection?)
Piers Morgan is left wing? News to me. Clarkson punched someone working on Top Gear for bringing him cold food, IIRC, it's why he was sacked from the programme.
If he's left wing how come so much of what he says pisses me off?
Because he's an arse.
You've put your finger on it, I think. His relentless arseness obliterates all else, inc his political orientation. Indeed in a sense that *is* his political orientation: Arse.
Assuming Dorries does step down and force a by election why shouldn't Labour contest it to win? After all Labour were second in Mid Bedfordshire in 2019 not the LDs and on the swing in the Selby by election would win it.
Starmer and the NEC will also not like the fact that LD leaflet is already trashing their candidate as well as the Tories and Dorries
Labour will contest it, just as they did Somerton and Frome.
The LDs were second in Somerton and Frome in 2019 not Labour
So? Voters are well organised and motivated to remove your corrupt party from power. Lab/LD will take a stonking victory whilst the other loses its deposit in one seat, and the other way round in another seat. A lot more Labour wins than LD, but you can't deny that the ABC vote is well organised and coming to get you.
Given the LDs have just produced a leaflet trashing the Labour candidate in Mid Bedfordshire the local Labour party will certainly not concede it and nor will Starmer. If he is heading for No 10 with a majority he should be winning seats like Mid Bedfordshire where Labour were second at the last general election as Blair did pre 1997
Oh come off it. Mid Beds has never been on anyone's target list before there was a sniff of a by election.
Even in 1997 the majority was 7000. It is normally over 20,000. In the two elections before that (2010, 2005) when it did drop below 20,000 the LDs were 2nd and the majority was still huge. The Tory vote share is often around 60% and hasn't dropped below 45% unless you go back to 1950 and they have never lost the seat.
In no way, outside of a by election is this on anyone's target list.
In fairness, I think HYUFD's point is not that this would be a General Election target but that this IS a by-election and, pre-1997, Blair would've won and not given the Lib Dems a sniff starting from second (Lib Dems did win a couple of by-elections during Blair's period as LOTO, but starting from second place and with Labour giving them a run for their money).
There is some truth in that, albeit as it happened none of Labour's by-election gains 1994-7 came in such deep blue territory as the three that arose were in seats that were likely to be on Labour's target list for a General Election.
That is not how I interpreted what he said, but in fairness to @HYUFD his words could be interpreted either way (I went back to read them thinking you were wrong, but agree you might be right). However I believe @HYUFD is being deliberately mischievous here and all credit to him for doing so. It is a fair tactic and they will deliberately muddy the water in the campaign (if it ever happens) He knows full well that LDs vs Lab here is the best thing for the Tories.
I have sympathy for the views from all parties on this one. I discussed it here with @NickPalmer a short while ago. We disagree on the topic but I suspect if he were a LD and I a Labour supporter we might both swap our views.
In a nut shell:
Labour wants the LDs to stop messing up their chances LDs want Labour to stop messing up their chances Torys want the LDs and Labour to mess up each other's chances.
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
Lviv looks lovely. I must go there once this is all over. My only Ukraine experience is Kyiv, which has its attractions but feels quite Soviet still, or at least did when I was there.
How was the train journey?
How was the thunderbox? We all want to know. Does the door open automatically in the middle of No 2?
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
No-one knows for sure how close Russia are to exhausting their reserves. Having three defensive lines might not help Russia much if they've thrown everything into defending the first line.
I hope that's the case, but hope doesn't mean much when it meets reality. I have no doubt Russia is hurting: but so is Ukraine, and the question is how long either side can withstand the attritional war.
I am very fearful that the western consensus to help Ukraine will dissipate over the next year, especially as the US gets further into its electoral fever. Russia knows it has to buy time, and sadly too many people on 'our' side are keen to give them the impression that time is all they need.
It is understandable to be worried as the stakes are high. What I would say is that Western resolve to assist Ukraine currently appears to be at its highest level. Certainly it is higher than it was this time last year.
We also see an increase in Ukraine's own capability that is not reliant on Western military support, in particular in it's production of drones.
Certainly the willingness of Russian soldiers to fight and die for a pointless imperialistic war continues to disappoint those of us hoping for a Ukrainian victory, but as long as China does not provide replacements for Russian losses in military equipment I am confident that Ukraine will prevail.
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
Is it the mayor of London's job to craft policy for people who are not his constituents?
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
How is it that the Conservatives have managed to miss the wide open London mayoral goal? In fact, they haven't just missed it, they have shot the ball into the stands on the far right.
They had one opportunity to pick someone sensible, attractive to the electorate, dynamic, interesting. I'm not suggesting Rory Stewart, but obviously someone of that kind of ilk who had a presence and who might galvanise moderate left voters in the way that Boris once did. They could have won this election in May, possibly with ease.
It's a measure of how disconnected the Conservative Party is becoming from power that at its moment of golden opportunity it managed to select someone so repulsively unelectable as Susan Hall.
Whom do you have in mind? Surely the problem is that the party *doesn't* have anyone with those attributes. In London or elsewhere...
George Osborne.
ROFL!
Jeremy Clarkson?
Far too divisive, reactionary, and anti-woke. He's exactly what the party needs to move away from, not towards.
You aren’t aware that the real life Clarkson is very different to the character he plays on TV? A Remainer for a start.
He cultivates an air of grumpy old-fashioned obnoxiousness, which regardless of his actual views is not likely to attract centrist London voters. But in current circs I think Jesus Christ would struggle as Tory candidate for London. Maybe their candidate is as good as any.
Anyone who spends a minute pondering Clarkson will come to the conclusion that he is in their side. Plenty won't bother spending that minute, that said.
Many moons ago, Clarkson wrote a column - perhaps better called a meta-column - about column writing. Basically, he had to write a certain number of columns a year - say, 40 - of a certain number of words. And do so for years. They also need to be entertaining and engage the paper's audience. The problem he outlined was that after a few years of this, he has covered everything. So his first part of writing is to read the week's papers, see what has engaged people and/or was controversial, and write about that in an engaging way. Hence he sometimes write columns which were directly contradicted by earlier columns he had written, and not particularly his own views at times.
It sounded quite honest, tbf, and could explain why columnists sometimes get into trouble.
Clarkson the column-writer might be a very different entity to Clarkson the celebrity, and that might be very different to Clarkson the real person.
Didn't Clarkson punch someone in the face for bringing him a cold steak? Did he do that as celebrity, a columnist or a real person, I wonder?
Did he? I knew he hit Piers Morgan, over something that I have a little sympathy with Clarkson for.
( I am saddened that Piers Morgan still has any prominence within our society. If Clarkson's bad, then Morgan's many times worse. We'd be better off without either. I wonder if Morgan's left-wing persuasion offers him some protection?)
Piers Morgan is left wing? News to me. Clarkson punched someone working on Top Gear for bringing him cold food, IIRC, it's why he was sacked from the programme.
If he's left wing how come so much of what he says pisses me off?
Because he's an arse.
You've put your finger on it, I think. His relentless arseness obliterates all else, inc his political orientation. Indeed in a sense that *is* his political orientation: Arse.
He put his finger on his arse? Really what has this site come to.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
The Tories might have fallen to 50 seats or less under Truss, they won't now under Rishi.
If they did though yes most likely they would merge with ReformUK within a decade under FPTP much like the Canadian Tories merged with the populist Canadian Alliance ultimately after their 1993 landslide defeat to form today's Conservative Party of Canada
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
IIRC the Apple Museum had a hefty entry fee why I walked past, years back.
Are you going to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church on Resslova Street? The museum in the basement is worth it.
It was a bit spooky to have seen the film Anthropoid the week before we went - they used a fair bit of actual Prague in it.
The old synagogue isn’t far away from that as well.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
Perhaps the Tories should help with that instead of just calling to scrap the whole thing?
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
When the congestion charge was introduced, I had a conversation with an A list celeb, who wanted it to be £100 a day. So he could drive his cars whenever he wanted. Get the poor off the roads.
That's why I would prefer a straight up ban with exceptions for goods deliveries, blue badge holders and diplomatic necessity. Rich people shouldn't be able to just buy their way out of walking / using public transport like the rest of us. And then there would be added incentive for the public transport to be good quality.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think the idea of the Conservatives being down to that level is a bit fanciful, by the way. As someone who remembers 1997, we're just not in a situation where the Conservatives will be at or below that level (when they won 165 seats).
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
Sure, however the discussion was about London. I don't care much what you do in Rhyl.
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
Is it the mayor of London's job to craft policy for people who are not his constituents?
No, of course not. Was 'outside Khan's remit' not clear enough? As replied to Horse, it's something that should be central government, although it could potentially by administered by the GLA.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
When the congestion charge was introduced, I had a conversation with an A list celeb, who wanted it to be £100 a day. So he could drive his cars whenever he wanted. Get the poor off the roads.
That's why I would prefer a straight up ban with exceptions for goods deliveries, blue badge holders and diplomatic necessity. Rich people shouldn't be able to just buy their way out of walking / using public transport like the rest of us. And then there would be added incentive for the public transport to be good quality.
Are Blue Badge holders allowed to work as chauffeurs for the rich?
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
Is it the mayor of London's job to craft policy for people who are not his constituents?
Especially those who are importing air pollution into the capital but not living with the consequences.
Level the charge based on income as in other countries and increase it every year, so if you own a Bentley it's £25,000 per day or something nonsensical. Then after 10 years ban all cars.
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
Is it the mayor of London's job to craft policy for people who are not his constituents?
No, of course not. Was 'outside Khan's remit' not clear enough? As replied to Horse, it's something that should be central government, although it could potentially by administered by the GLA.
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
IIRC the Apple Museum had a hefty entry fee why I walked past, years back.
Are you going to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church on Resslova Street? The museum in the basement is worth it.
It was a bit spooky to have seen the film Anthropoid the week before we went - they used a fair bit of actual Prague in it.
The old synagogue isn’t far away from that as well.
I assume the Apple Museum also has a walled garden?
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
Lviv looks lovely. I must go there once this is all over. My only Ukraine experience is Kyiv, which has its attractions but feels quite Soviet still, or at least did when I was there.
How was the train journey?
It is indeed lovely. As you say, more Eastern European city, similar to somewhere like Prague, than obviously Soviet city like Kiev - which isn’t much of a surprise given the history!
Train was actually okay, very Soviet but cheap and comfortable, and after a few glasses of vodka managed to sleep for a few hours.
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
This is an interesting question. If people vote for ULEZ or similar schemes, I don't think we should subsidise any increased cost of provision of services, and let the market pass the cost on instead. It will be a short-term issue anyway.
There was a similar question as parking permit zones were rolled out across Edinburgh. The general response from the trades was the cost of the trade permits would be passed on, like all other costs, but that increased ease of parking across the new zones would mitigate that cost significantly.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Level the charge based on income as in other countries and increase it every year, so if you own a Bentley it's £25,000 per day or something nonsensical. Then after 10 years ban all cars.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
When the congestion charge was introduced, I had a conversation with an A list celeb, who wanted it to be £100 a day. So he could drive his cars whenever he wanted. Get the poor off the roads.
That's why I would prefer a straight up ban with exceptions for goods deliveries, blue badge holders and diplomatic necessity. Rich people shouldn't be able to just buy their way out of walking / using public transport like the rest of us. And then there would be added incentive for the public transport to be good quality.
Blue badges are a bit of a racket. They get nicked or faked all to frequently.
You'd have to issue permits to individual vehicles. Any such scheme would then no doubt then expand to encompass people who are "important".
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
I only mentioned Edinburgh as I lived there and used to commute by bus every day to George Street though this was in the early 1960s
Of course Princess Street has the trams and the City has changed beyond all recognition to my days, though no doubt I would still use the bus to commute if I had a central Edinburgh office job, unless I could work from home.
When we lived in London we drove into the West End once. On a Sunday morning, to collect an item of furniture we'd bought. Not the easiest journey, but better than trying to carry it home on the tube.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
Sure, however the discussion was about London. I don't care much what you do in Rhyl.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
Sure, however the discussion was about London. I don't care much what you do in Rhyl.
When we lived in London we drove into the West End once. On a Sunday morning, to collect an item of furniture we'd bought. Not the easiest journey, but better than trying to carry it home on the tube.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Wales voted for Brexit anyway and unless Rees Mogg or Braverman are elected UK PM it isn't really an issue for the Union what the Tories do in opposition if Sunak loses to Starmer at the next general election
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
And they can continue destroying the planet and the lungs of our children.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
And they can continue destroying the planet and the lungs of our children.
Neither bicycles nor electric vehicles do either of those.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
Means nobody can walk anywhere – it's a credo that has destroyed many US cities, sadly. Avoid.
A complete S-400 system costs several hundred million dollars. But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598 A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
Sure, however the discussion was about London. I don't care much what you do in Rhyl.
I do not live in Rhyl
What have you got against Rhyl? Stop being a snob
Nothing just my interest are in my community and area which is Llandudno, Colwyn Bay and Conwy
The outstanding concern is the non-Londoners with a frequent need to drive into the ULEZ for work etc. That's outside Khan's remit, but there should be support for them, too (subject to some kind of testing of need to drive into London etc)
This is an interesting question. If people vote for ULEZ or similar schemes, I don't think we should subsidise any increased cost of provision of services, and let the market pass the cost on instead. It will be a short-term issue anyway.
There was a similar question as parking permit zones were rolled out across Edinburgh. The general response from the trades was the cost of the trade permits would be passed on, like all other costs, but that increased ease of parking across the new zones would mitigate that cost significantly.
I was thinking about private individuals, rather than commercial vehicles/entities (but that could be a fuzzy line). Also, any support should be to obtain a compliant car (in most cases a diesel could be traded for a compliant pertrol at little additional cost) and/or switch to other modes of transport - thereby supporting the objectives of the ULEZ - not simply pay the charge.
It just seems unfair that someone living in the ULEZ and driving to work say in Essex could get support, but someone living in Essex and driving into the ULEZ for work would not (all that as I understand it; I could be wrong).
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
When we lived in London we drove into the West End once. On a Sunday morning, to collect an item of furniture we'd bought. Not the easiest journey, but better than trying to carry it home on the tube.
Getting it delivered might have been easier
A disproportionate cost for something that fitted in the car.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
And they can continue destroying the planet and the lungs of our children.
Neither bicycles nor electric vehicles do either of those.
Get with the times.
EVs do - road building, especially thje kind you want. And the energy to power them. What happens when everyone wants one is an interesting question, as pointed out recently on here.
How is it that the Conservatives have managed to miss the wide open London mayoral goal? In fact, they haven't just missed it, they have shot the ball into the stands on the far right.
They had one opportunity to pick someone sensible, attractive to the electorate, dynamic, interesting. I'm not suggesting Rory Stewart, but obviously someone of that kind of ilk who had a presence and who might galvanise moderate left voters in the way that Boris once did. They could have won this election in May, possibly with ease.
It's a measure of how disconnected the Conservative Party is becoming from power that at its moment of golden opportunity it managed to select someone so repulsively unelectable as Susan Hall.
Whom do you have in mind? Surely the problem is that the party *doesn't* have anyone with those attributes. In London or elsewhere...
George Osborne.
ROFL!
Jeremy Clarkson?
Far too divisive, reactionary, and anti-woke. He's exactly what the party needs to move away from, not towards.
You aren’t aware that the real life Clarkson is very different to the character he plays on TV? A Remainer for a start.
He cultivates an air of grumpy old-fashioned obnoxiousness, which regardless of his actual views is not likely to attract centrist London voters. But in current circs I think Jesus Christ would struggle as Tory candidate for London. Maybe their candidate is as good as any.
Anyone who spends a minute pondering Clarkson will come to the conclusion that he is in their side. Plenty won't bother spending that minute, that said.
Many moons ago, Clarkson wrote a column - perhaps better called a meta-column - about column writing. Basically, he had to write a certain number of columns a year - say, 40 - of a certain number of words. And do so for years. They also need to be entertaining and engage the paper's audience. The problem he outlined was that after a few years of this, he has covered everything. So his first part of writing is to read the week's papers, see what has engaged people and/or was controversial, and write about that in an engaging way. Hence he sometimes write columns which were directly contradicted by earlier columns he had written, and not particularly his own views at times.
It sounded quite honest, tbf, and could explain why columnists sometimes get into trouble.
Clarkson the column-writer might be a very different entity to Clarkson the celebrity, and that might be very different to Clarkson the real person.
Didn't Clarkson punch someone in the face for bringing him a cold steak? Did he do that as celebrity, a columnist or a real person, I wonder?
Did he? I knew he hit Piers Morgan, over something that I have a little sympathy with Clarkson for.
( I am saddened that Piers Morgan still has any prominence within our society. If Clarkson's bad, then Morgan's many times worse. We'd be better off without either. I wonder if Morgan's left-wing persuasion offers him some protection?)
Piers Morgan is left wing? News to me. Clarkson punched someone working on Top Gear for bringing him cold food, IIRC, it's why he was sacked from the programme.
If he's left wing how come so much of what he says pisses me off?
Because he's an arse.
We also need to remind ourselves that Piers Twatface was fired from the Mirror by faking pictures of squaddies pissing on insurgent prisoners and putting said photos on the front page.
I also remind you of my frequent complaint that rich people in the UK can commit any atrocity and are never punished.
The only problem with Jeremy Clarkson wrt Piers Badman is that he did not tie Piers upside-down to the Robin Reliant Space Shuttle before launch and film it from several angles
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
Means nobody can walk anywhere – it's a credo that has destroyed many US cities, sadly. Avoid.
That's nonsense.
Again segregated roads with footpaths separated from both bikes and roads are perfectly safe for people to walk down. Having pedestrians having to battle with either cars or bikes because they don't have their own separate and safe land to use is more of an issue.
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
IIRC the Apple Museum had a hefty entry fee why I walked past, years back.
Are you going to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church on Resslova Street? The museum in the basement is worth it.
It was a bit spooky to have seen the film Anthropoid the week before we went - they used a fair bit of actual Prague in it.
The old synagogue isn’t far away from that as well.
Thanks for the suggestions, only here for one day so will see how things go!
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Rees-Mogg wouldn't keep his seat in an election where the Tories were below 100 seats. Indeed, the predecessor seat was Labour until 2010 (boundary changes helped the Tories so it was a notional hold but marginal at that time).
He'll probably hold on with a more realistic General Election result on a heavily split Labour/Lib Dem vote, but he's not in ultra-safe territory.
I agree there are some traditional Tories in less traditional seats, and some new Tories in ultra-safe ones. What I'm saying is it seems unlikely, if the Tories were reduced to a rump, those remaining would be dispropotionately of the "Lee Anderson type" as Tim said.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Wales voted for Brexit anyway and unless Rees Mogg or Braverman are elected UK PM it isn't really an issue for the Union what the Tories do in opposition if Sunak loses to Starmer at the next general election
And Welsh independence desire is growing, especially amongst the young, who were not the most likely demographic to support Brexit. And this was considering the logic of few Tory MPs and what that would mean the party "evolved" into. I think the new Tory party would evolve into something closer to the GOP than it currently is, partly because the Americanisation of our politics and partly because the economic consensus is weakening and so culture wars are easier to ways to split people away from class interest. It is possible that the Tories become the third (or even forth) party behind the LDs and SNP, but if they are the opposition I think it does matter where they stand on policy because they are the most likely party to form a government after Labour. I also don't see Starmer being popular / keeping such a large majority for long as he is mostly winning on the benefit of not being the Tories rather than any real desire for his policy solutions to the problems we face as a nation.
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
In Greater London, there are still areas where there's resentment at being in Greater London at all, even getting on for 60 years on. Havering natch; here's something you won't hear Andrew Rosindell raising in Parliament;
Bromley and Bexley still have patches of "Kent, actually". It was probably a factor in Uxbridge. It's an unspoken, emotional factor in the ULEZ expansion.
Is there something similar GM? When I was the other side of the Pennines, West Yorkshire was probably more acceptable than Greater Leeds.
This is a very good point.
I briefly worked in Leigh, and there people would absolutely hate being classed as a suburb of Wigan and were fiercely Leigh not Wigan. Now Leigh and Wigan are both classed as part of Greater Manchester. It always seemed though that Wigan was the problem in Leigh's eyes, not Manchester.
The original proposal by Burnham to have a charge zone, like ULEZ, across the whole of Greater Manchester was absolutely ridiculous. The idea that inner Manchester/Salford and outer Wigan need the same policy is clearly not true. Its good that they've rowed back and come up with a completely different, and better, solution. Hopefully other cities and regions can look at the work Burnham has done on this subject and learn from it - we should look at good ideas regardless of which party they come from.
it seems to be demanding money from central government to fund a scrappage scheme.
Which if you want a progressive rather than regressive solution, or a solution which actually works, is surely a better alternative?
Why is taxing poor people who can't afford to replace their vehicles better than having a scrappage scheme to assist them to actually replace vehicles?
And if a scrappage scheme gets more polluting cars off the road, faster, then isn't it a good idea?
I thought Labour was supposed to be the party of progressive politics. Telling rich people who can afford clean vehicles they can drive tax free while poor people need to pay the taxes, how is that progressive?
And if the government says no, you can't have any money from us? Which is what happened in London, after all.
*cough* Crossrail *cough*
*coughchokeNPRsplutterHS2chokecough*
Well that's rather the point, isn't it? Crossrail - of course, there you go London, have a nice shiny mass transit system. NPR? Ooh, no. Not all of it. Take Sheffield out. And also just use the existing railways in West Yorkshire. And in Merseyside. And, no, you can't put Piccadilly Underground - keep it on the surface and have a turnback station with limited capacity which doesn't work. HS2? Well, we'll do the bit in the south. But we won't go to the East Midlands, or Leeds, or anywhere north of Manchester.
It's quite hard from the perspective of Northern England to see anything other than London getting almost all of the transport spend.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
"Crushed".
That's why so many people are leaving Edinburgh, and there is a massive east-to-west shift as we all escape to Livingston/Warrington.
Edinburgh has the lowest rates of cycling anywhere in Scotland due to all the tenements and proximity of our workplaces, and rumours of glorious parks and an extinct volcano are completely unfounded.
Indeed, I walked across North Bridge yesterday and there wasn't another soul. The city is dead, killed by the anti-motoring lobby.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Tunnel. If they can build tunnels for the Lizzy line, they can build a tunnel through central London for buses. Like the Strand underpass only longer. With entrances at ground level for bus-stops.
Actually a series of criss-crossing road tunnels under London would be great, once most cars and buses are EVs (now it would generate a lot of polluted air underground). Then pedestrianise the whole of the centre sauf riverains.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
Means nobody can walk anywhere – it's a credo that has destroyed many US cities, sadly. Avoid.
That's nonsense.
Again segregated roads with footpaths separated from both bikes and roads are perfectly safe for people to walk down. Having pedestrians having to battle with either cars or bikes because they don't have their own separate and safe land to use is more of an issue.
More of an issue is two miles plus to shops and services. Means most journeys are made by car. Avoid.
A complete S-400 system costs several hundred million dollars. But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598 A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
I quite like the idea of flying large but cheap drones at the Russian air defences. They don’t even need to be armed with anything more than a couple of grenades, the primary aim being to waste the enemy’s expensive air defence missiles before the F-16s turn up.
When we lived in London we drove into the West End once. On a Sunday morning, to collect an item of furniture we'd bought. Not the easiest journey, but better than trying to carry it home on the tube.
Getting it delivered might have been easier
A disproportionate cost for something that fitted in the car.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Tunnel. If they can build tunnels for the Lizzy line, they can build a tunnel through central London for buses. Like the Strand underpass only longer. With entrances at ground level for bus-stops.
Actually a series of criss-crossing road tunnels under London would be great, once most cars and buses are EVs (now it would generate a lot of polluted air underground). Then pedestrianise the whole of the centre sauf riverains.
Seattle did that decades ago. Gave me a huge surprise the first time when the bus dived into a hole.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Rees-Mogg wouldn't keep his seat in an election where the Tories were below 100 seats. Indeed, the predecessor seat was Labour until 2010 (boundary changes helped the Tories so it was a notional hold but marginal at that time).
He'll probably hold on with a more realistic General Election result on a heavily split Labour/Lib Dem vote, but he's not in ultra-safe territory.
I agree there are some traditional Tories in less traditional seats, and some new Tories in ultra-safe ones. What I'm saying is it seems unlikely, if the Tories were reduced to a rump, those remaining would be dispropotionately of the "Lee Anderson type" as Tim said.
If I have the time I might take a look at the safest 50 Tory seats, and who represents them. That wouldn't necessarily be the seats left of course, but it would be a start.
The other possibility of course is that a party down to 50 or fewer parliamentary seats would see a shift in power to non-MPs: London and Welsh assembly members, Scottish MSPs, councillors etc. That's certainly the case in the Lib Dems.
Assuming Dorries does step down and force a by election why shouldn't Labour contest it to win? After all Labour were second in Mid Bedfordshire in 2019 not the LDs and on the swing in the Selby by election would win it.
Starmer and the NEC will also not like the fact that LD leaflet is already trashing their candidate as well as the Tories and Dorries
Labour have every right to fight it, but it is an unnecessary reputational risk if they fail and boost to the Tories if they hold on as a consequence. Regardless of the fact they are in 2nd place the LDs are the ones most able to win. In fact without Lab campaigning it would be a slam dunk. If Lab are going to fight it you can't then expect the LDs not to fight them.
The best opportunity for the Tories is for the LDs and Lab to both fight it so I understand why you are keen Lab fight this seat.
I think it's just as likely, maybe more likely, that if the LDs and Lab both fight the seat, the Tories drop to third as it is the Tories squeezing through the middle to win. Coming third would be even more disastrous for the Tories than just losing badly but remaining second. So, I suggest, it may also be the worst opportunity for the Tories if both opposition parties fight.
Greetings from the Pravda Brewery Beer Theatre, Market Sq, Lviv - where there’s 56 beers on tap!
What a lovely old city, cobbled streets, trams, dozens of street bars. We went to the national museum, but sadly most of the old stuff there had been removed for safety, there was an old Jesuit church basement which was quite funky, and there’s an Apple Museum we’re going to see this afternoon. That’s a museum of old computers, not old apples!
Cheers!
IIRC the Apple Museum had a hefty entry fee why I walked past, years back.
Are you going to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church on Resslova Street? The museum in the basement is worth it.
It was a bit spooky to have seen the film Anthropoid the week before we went - they used a fair bit of actual Prague in it.
The old synagogue isn’t far away from that as well.
I assume the Apple Museum also has a walled garden?
It doesn't fall over very often, either. Which is a good quality for a museum to possess.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
"Crushed".
That's why so many people are leaving Edinburgh, and there is a massive east-to-west shift as we all escape to Livingston/Warrington.
Edinburgh has the lowest rates of cycling anywhere in Scotland due to all the tenements and proximity of our workplaces, and rumours of glorious parks and an extinct volcano are completely unfounded.
Indeed, I walked across North Bridge yesterday and there wasn't another soul. The city is dead, killed by the anti-motoring lobby.
This is beginning to remind me of the depopulated barrier of the Great Scottish Central Desert invoked by PBScottishExperts in the covid arguments, and the fun @Theuniondivvie and I had in recalling our experiences of camel caravans from the silver mines at Leadhill to the port at Borrowstounness by way of the thriving crossroads emporium of Bathgate under the Red Mountains, with comely maidens in veils selling Irn-bru flavoured dates in the market, and the road west through the dunes marked by the skeletons of Ranjer Tribe members retreating after a periodic defeat by the Hibee clan.
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
Interesting one this, and there's no definitive answer.
Firstly, emotionally, much of GM IS still Lancashire/Cheshire/Yorkshire. But also GM. Some people are very much of the "Cheshire, actually" persuasion, others very much the opposite - some of this is through taste but much through ignorance of local government, history and geography and the relationships between them - a complex subject which lack of interest in is quite forgiveable. But I would say the majority are quite comfortable in overlapping identities: Altrincham can be Altrincham, Cheshire and also part of Greater Manchester. (Is this because there is no longer a Cheshire County Council not to be part of, I wonder? Probably not. Most people simply aren't that interested in that level of detail.)
When GM was abolished in 1986, it didn't go away of course - the concept of an urban area around Manchester was still there, whether it had an elected authority or not. And of course the GM Boroughs had to refer to themselves as something - and of course there was still a GM Fire and Rescue, GM Police, etc, as well as non-state organisations such as the GM Football Association, I think (though others such as rugby and cricket had never seen a need to change their boundaries to match local government reform - and why not, because local government never matched historic counties in the first place - the county boroughs like Manchester, Liverpool, Oldham, etc existed outwith the jurisdiction of Lancashire County Council and no-one minded or said 'actually technically we're not Lancashire' - because local government <> geography.)
Anyway, the 1974-1986 GM authority wasn't the most harmonious of beasts: as you say, there was a lot of tension between Manchester and everyone else; and not actually a great deal of lamentation in the outer boroughs at its demise. The Manchester Labour Party in those days were hard left take-on-the government types, whereas Salford's Labour Party was prepared to work with the government - that, in fact, was how Salford Quays came about, much to the chagrin of the hard left in Manchester who saw their role as to fight Thatcher rather than necessarily to improve Manchester. That lot were removed in an internal putsch the mechanisms of which I am only vaguely aware about 1987 - and since then (possibly coincidentally), the GM authorities have been pretty good at getting on with each other, co-operating rather than competing (up to a point!). The structure we have now has sort of grown organically. We have a mayor who sits on top and is elected, but the districts retain more control than they did in the GMC days. The structure we have represents what GM wants, rather than what any part of it wants. There's still tension (Stockport has withdrawn from the joint plan), but less than there was.
[cont] Anyway, apologies for long rambling reply. It's an interesting question and the answer is definitely feelings-based, and I'm sure others in GM would have different perspectives.
As a final point, I think there was a remarkably similar story in Tyne and Wear.
Oh yes, the Mackems really enjoyed being under the thumb of Geordies.
The biggest pisser for them was the "Tyne and Wear Metro", which for decades went nowhere near Wearside.
This has carried on in a wider context, which was how they ended up with a "North of Tyne" mayor, when pre-1974 County Durham wanted nowt to do with it, fearing another power grab from The Toon.
And from my perspective, Gateshead is in County Durham. Just as it was when I was born there. That's my county. coz that's where I'm from. No Whitehall bureaucrat will tell me any different.
And of course, Middlesbrough will forever be a Small Town in Yorkshire.
Well yes, my point was that the Tyne and Wear county council was typified by (and apologies, I'm away from my own geography so my understanding is far hazier) Newcastle dominance over the others. But post 1986, the five Tyne and Wear authorities were pretty pragmatic about working together and bringing inward investment in to the area e.g. Nissan. They worked together better when they weren't forced to do so. And after 1993, joint working grew organically. The North of Tyne issue has gone differently to what happened in GM, I grant you.
And yes, there's no reason Gateshead should not be described as County Durham - whatever form local government might currently be taking. (There are reasons why you might want local government to reflect historic geography, and also reasons why you might want local government to reflect economic geography - my view tends to the latter but that shouldn't mean that, for example, Gateshead is not County Durham. And I am receptive to arguments the other way.)
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Tunnel. If they can build tunnels for the Lizzy line, they can build a tunnel through central London for buses. Like the Strand underpass only longer. With entrances at ground level for bus-stops.
Actually a series of criss-crossing road tunnels under London would be great, once most cars and buses are EVs (now it would generate a lot of polluted air underground). Then pedestrianise the whole of the centre sauf riverains.
There's this mad South African in the US. Spends on day banging on about Woke on Twitter. He's building a space rocket in his back yard. He's crazy as fuck but he may be able to help you
[PS it is incredibly difficult to build things underground in London. Everything is criss-crossed by electricity lines, sewage pipes, etc. Look at how long it took to build Tube lines]
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
This is not obviously true at all. Sprawl means more space between sites that need services delivered to them. That means longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas / electrical supplies. Every single one of these carries a high per mile cost to install & an ongoing maintenance burden that has to be paid for.
Unless you gain in efficiency elsewhere, the economic cost of maintaining this infrastructure acts as a permanent drag on your economy. City centres are far more efficient in terms of services created for a given support cost.
Roads in particular are incredibly expensive & have to be continuously maintained. A dual carriageway A-road in the UK runs at about £40million / mile to build & about £200k / mile / year to maintain.
Even if you discount the initial construction cost, that maintenance burden is an ongoing cost. Fine if the economic benefits a road brings (and those are obviously very real!) outweigh the costs, but at some point you reach a level of sprawl that the businesses & dwellings along a given road cannot possible pay the taxes required to pay for the ongoing maintenance of their road & other services.
Large swathes of the US are already at this point: In some cases these areas survive by creaming off some of the tax take from higher productivity city centres, others are in inexorable decline. Fortunately the US is rich enough to cope - but either they subsidise the exurbs or the exurbs decline; these places are (mostly) incapable of paying their own way economically.
There's actually very little difference in strategy. The Biden strategy is a 'beggar thy neighbour' strategy too, aimed at shoring up the US's economy often at the expense of everyone else's.
And Biden's other big intervention - the CHIPS Act - is a strategic necessity.
It's the same picture across the board for electronics manufacturing - Biden has acted on that. Trump's proposed tariff would do nothing to address it.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
"Crushed".
That's why so many people are leaving Edinburgh, and there is a massive east-to-west shift as we all escape to Livingston/Warrington.
Edinburgh has the lowest rates of cycling anywhere in Scotland due to all the tenements and proximity of our workplaces, and rumours of glorious parks and an extinct volcano are completely unfounded.
Indeed, I walked across North Bridge yesterday and there wasn't another soul. The city is dead, killed by the anti-motoring lobby.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
US cities do not seem a stunningly successful model to follow.
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
Interesting one this, and there's no definitive answer.
Firstly, emotionally, much of GM IS still Lancashire/Cheshire/Yorkshire. But also GM. Some people are very much of the "Cheshire, actually" persuasion, others very much the opposite - some of this is through taste but much through ignorance of local government, history and geography and the relationships between them - a complex subject which lack of interest in is quite forgiveable. But I would say the majority are quite comfortable in overlapping identities: Altrincham can be Altrincham, Cheshire and also part of Greater Manchester. (Is this because there is no longer a Cheshire County Council not to be part of, I wonder? Probably not. Most people simply aren't that interested in that level of detail.)
When GM was abolished in 1986, it didn't go away of course - the concept of an urban area around Manchester was still there, whether it had an elected authority or not. And of course the GM Boroughs had to refer to themselves as something - and of course there was still a GM Fire and Rescue, GM Police, etc, as well as non-state organisations such as the GM Football Association, I think (though others such as rugby and cricket had never seen a need to change their boundaries to match local government reform - and why not, because local government never matched historic counties in the first place - the county boroughs like Manchester, Liverpool, Oldham, etc existed outwith the jurisdiction of Lancashire County Council and no-one minded or said 'actually technically we're not Lancashire' - because local government <> geography.)
Anyway, the 1974-1986 GM authority wasn't the most harmonious of beasts: as you say, there was a lot of tension between Manchester and everyone else; and not actually a great deal of lamentation in the outer boroughs at its demise. The Manchester Labour Party in those days were hard left take-on-the government types, whereas Salford's Labour Party was prepared to work with the government - that, in fact, was how Salford Quays came about, much to the chagrin of the hard left in Manchester who saw their role as to fight Thatcher rather than necessarily to improve Manchester. That lot were removed in an internal putsch the mechanisms of which I am only vaguely aware about 1987 - and since then (possibly coincidentally), the GM authorities have been pretty good at getting on with each other, co-operating rather than competing (up to a point!). The structure we have now has sort of grown organically. We have a mayor who sits on top and is elected, but the districts retain more control than they did in the GMC days. The structure we have represents what GM wants, rather than what any part of it wants. There's still tension (Stockport has withdrawn from the joint plan), but less than there was.
[cont] Anyway, apologies for long rambling reply. It's an interesting question and the answer is definitely feelings-based, and I'm sure others in GM would have different perspectives.
As a final point, I think there was a remarkably similar story in Tyne and Wear.
Oh yes, the Mackems really enjoyed being under the thumb of Geordies.
The biggest pisser for them was the "Tyne and Wear Metro", which for decades went nowhere near Wearside.
This has carried on in a wider context, which was how they ended up with a "North of Tyne" mayor, when pre-1974 County Durham wanted nowt to do with it, fearing another power grab from The Toon.
And from my perspective, Gateshead is in County Durham. Just as it was when I was born there. That's my county. coz that's where I'm from. No Whitehall bureaucrat will tell me any different.
And of course, Middlesbrough will forever be a Small Town in Yorkshire.
Well yes, my point was that the Tyne and Wear county council was typified by (and apologies, I'm away from my own geography so my understanding is far hazier) Newcastle dominance over the others. But post 1986, the five Tyne and Wear authorities were pretty pragmatic about working together and bringing inward investment in to the area e.g. Nissan. They worked together better when they weren't forced to do so. And after 1993, joint working grew organically. The North of Tyne issue has gone differently to what happened in GM, I grant you.
And yes, there's no reason Gateshead should not be described as County Durham - whatever form local government might currently be taking. (There are reasons why you might want local government to reflect historic geography, and also reasons why you might want local government to reflect economic geography - my view tends to the latter but that shouldn't mean that, for example, Gateshead is not County Durham. And I am receptive to arguments the other way.)
One reason why Gateshead shouldn't be described as County Durham is that it hasn't been in said county for almost 50 years, and nobody under 40 thinks of it that way.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Rees-Mogg wouldn't keep his seat in an election where the Tories were below 100 seats. Indeed, the predecessor seat was Labour until 2010 (boundary changes helped the Tories so it was a notional hold but marginal at that time).
He'll probably hold on with a more realistic General Election result on a heavily split Labour/Lib Dem vote, but he's not in ultra-safe territory.
I agree there are some traditional Tories in less traditional seats, and some new Tories in ultra-safe ones. What I'm saying is it seems unlikely, if the Tories were reduced to a rump, those remaining would be dispropotionately of the "Lee Anderson type" as Tim said.
If I have the time I might take a look at the safest 50 Tory seats, and who represents them. That wouldn't necessarily be the seats left of course, but it would be a start.
The other possibility of course is that a party down to 50 or fewer parliamentary seats would see a shift in power to non-MPs: London and Welsh assembly members, Scottish MSPs, councillors etc. That's certainly the case in the Lib Dems.
If the Tories were wiped on that scale, they'd be unlikely to have much presence elsewhere either - except the Lords, where they'd still be the largest party for some time. While it existed.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Tunnel. If they can build tunnels for the Lizzy line, they can build a tunnel through central London for buses. Like the Strand underpass only longer. With entrances at ground level for bus-stops.
Actually a series of criss-crossing road tunnels under London would be great, once most cars and buses are EVs (now it would generate a lot of polluted air underground). Then pedestrianise the whole of the centre sauf riverains.
There's this mad South African in the US. Spends on day banging on about Woke on Twitter. He's building a space rocket in his back yard. He's crazy as fuck but he may be able to help you
[PS it is incredibly difficult to build things underground in London. Everything is criss-crossed by electricity lines, sewage pipes, etc. Look at how long it took to build Tube lines]
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
This is not obviously true at all. Sprawl means more space between sites that need services delivered to them. That means longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas / electrical supplies. Every single one of these carries a high per mile cost to install & an ongoing maintenance burden that has to be paid for.
Unless you gain in efficiency elsewhere, the economic cost of maintaining this infrastructure acts as a permanent drag on your economy. City centres are far more efficient in terms of services created for a given support cost.
Roads in particular are incredibly expensive & have to be continuously maintained. A dual carriageway A-road in the UK runs at about £40million / mile to build & about £200k / mile / year to maintain.
Even if you discount the initial construction cost, that maintenance burden is an ongoing cost. Fine if the economic benefits a road brings (and those are obviously very real!) outweigh the costs, but at some point you reach a level of sprawl that the businesses & dwellings along a given road cannot possible pay the taxes required to pay for the ongoing maintenance of their road & other services.
Large swathes of the US are already at this point: In some cases these areas survive by creaming off some of the tax take from higher productivity city centres, others are in inexorable decline. Fortunately the US is rich enough to cope - but either they subsidise the exurbs or the exurbs decline; these places are (mostly) incapable of paying their own way economically.
Is there a chance I'm subsiding BR to live in his suburban semi-detached new build (in a fancy pants LTN)?
A complete S-400 system costs several hundred million dollars. But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598 A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
Hitting it is one thing, but how the h*ll did they have a surveillance drone watching it without it being picked up?
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
In Greater London, there are still areas where there's resentment at being in Greater London at all, even getting on for 60 years on. Havering natch; here's something you won't hear Andrew Rosindell raising in Parliament;
Bromley and Bexley still have patches of "Kent, actually". It was probably a factor in Uxbridge. It's an unspoken, emotional factor in the ULEZ expansion.
Is there something similar GM? When I was the other side of the Pennines, West Yorkshire was probably more acceptable than Greater Leeds.
This is a very good point.
I briefly worked in Leigh, and there people would absolutely hate being classed as a suburb of Wigan and were fiercely Leigh not Wigan. Now Leigh and Wigan are both classed as part of Greater Manchester. It always seemed though that Wigan was the problem in Leigh's eyes, not Manchester.
The original proposal by Burnham to have a charge zone, like ULEZ, across the whole of Greater Manchester was absolutely ridiculous. The idea that inner Manchester/Salford and outer Wigan need the same policy is clearly not true. Its good that they've rowed back and come up with a completely different, and better, solution. Hopefully other cities and regions can look at the work Burnham has done on this subject and learn from it - we should look at good ideas regardless of which party they come from.
it seems to be demanding money from central government to fund a scrappage scheme.
Which if you want a progressive rather than regressive solution, or a solution which actually works, is surely a better alternative?
Why is taxing poor people who can't afford to replace their vehicles better than having a scrappage scheme to assist them to actually replace vehicles?
And if a scrappage scheme gets more polluting cars off the road, faster, then isn't it a good idea?
I thought Labour was supposed to be the party of progressive politics. Telling rich people who can afford clean vehicles they can drive tax free while poor people need to pay the taxes, how is that progressive?
And if the government says no, you can't have any money from us? Which is what happened in London, after all.
*cough* Crossrail *cough*
*coughchokeNPRsplutterHS2chokecough*
Well that's rather the point, isn't it? Crossrail - of course, there you go London, have a nice shiny mass transit system. NPR? Ooh, no. Not all of it. Take Sheffield out. And also just use the existing railways in West Yorkshire. And in Merseyside. And, no, you can't put Piccadilly Underground - keep it on the surface and have a turnback station with limited capacity which doesn't work. HS2? Well, we'll do the bit in the south. But we won't go to the East Midlands, or Leeds, or anywhere north of Manchester.
It's quite hard from the perspective of Northern England to see anything other than London getting almost all of the transport spend.
Spending so much time indulging in parochial nonsense about ancient county boundaries hardly helps.
Big, well organised metro cities would have more clout. Greater Manchester....... and Greater Leeds, Greater Newcastle, Greater Sheffield, each with a powerful mayor.
Assuming Dorries does step down and force a by election why shouldn't Labour contest it to win? After all Labour were second in Mid Bedfordshire in 2019 not the LDs and on the swing in the Selby by election would win it.
Starmer and the NEC will also not like the fact that LD leaflet is already trashing their candidate as well as the Tories and Dorries
Labour have every right to fight it, but it is an unnecessary reputational risk if they fail and boost to the Tories if they hold on as a consequence. Regardless of the fact they are in 2nd place the LDs are the ones most able to win. In fact without Lab campaigning it would be a slam dunk. If Lab are going to fight it you can't then expect the LDs not to fight them.
The best opportunity for the Tories is for the LDs and Lab to both fight it so I understand why you are keen Lab fight this seat.
I think it's just as likely, maybe more likely, that if the LDs and Lab both fight the seat, the Tories drop to third as it is the Tories squeezing through the middle to win. Coming third would be even more disastrous for the Tories than just losing badly but remaining second. So, I suggest, it may also be the worst opportunity for the Tories if both opposition parties fight.
I have seen this mentioned before. You? And it is a real possible outcome that I hadn't considered.
I can't believe however that is anyone's actual cunning plan.
It would however be a brilliant outcome. If it happened with the LDs winning I might actually explode.
A complete S-400 system costs several hundred million dollars. But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598 A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
There's also a claim today that they hit one of the coastal Bastion systems near Olenivka in Crimea, that has been firing Oniks anti-ship missiles at Ukrainian cities.
Edit: Ah no. That was the earlier rumour, but now confirmed as the S-400.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
US cities do not seem a stunningly successful model to follow.
From the point of view of efficiency there probably are two poles to go for, each of which is a form of stable equilibrium. Either total full-on sprawl and decentralisation as epitomised by cities in the US South, and as Bart proposes (though I think he's enjoying being a tad provocative), or properly densified, walkable and cyclable cities with good public transport as seen in much of Europe. The trouble in Britain as with so many things is we have a bit of a halfway house.
From the point of view of aesthetics and sustainability though there's really no contest.
A complete S-400 system costs several hundred million dollars. But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598 A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
Hitting it is one thing, but how the h*ll did they have a surveillance drone watching it without it being picked up?
That question will be giving all major militaries nightmares. The drones can be very small, hard to detect, hard to hit, and even somewhat autonomous. Something like holographic radar might help; fir instance the stuff produced by this lovely Cambridge company.
Certainly the willingness of Russian soldiers to fight and die for a pointless imperialistic war continues to disappoint those of us hoping for a Ukrainian victory, but as long as China does not provide replacements for Russian losses in military equipment I am confident that Ukraine will prevail.
Apparently one of Russia's pilots just took advantage of the generous deal Ukraine is offering on used helicopters. Either that or he got very badly lost, which seems to be the story the Russians are going for.
When we lived in London we drove into the West End once. On a Sunday morning, to collect an item of furniture we'd bought. Not the easiest journey, but better than trying to carry it home on the tube.
Getting it delivered might have been easier
A disproportionate cost for something that fitted in the car.
The epitome of an edge case.
It was a very nice edge case, and fitted in nicely in our living room.
Anyway, the point I was making was that as someone living at the end of the Central Line in West London for 4 years, I only drove into town on one occasion. It should be the exception, not the norm, for people heading into central London.
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
Interesting one this, and there's no definitive answer.
Firstly, emotionally, much of GM IS still Lancashire/Cheshire/Yorkshire. But also GM. Some people are very much of the "Cheshire, actually" persuasion, others very much the opposite - some of this is through taste but much through ignorance of local government, history and geography and the relationships between them - a complex subject which lack of interest in is quite forgiveable. But I would say the majority are quite comfortable in overlapping identities: Altrincham can be Altrincham, Cheshire and also part of Greater Manchester. (Is this because there is no longer a Cheshire County Council not to be part of, I wonder? Probably not. Most people simply aren't that interested in that level of detail.)
When GM was abolished in 1986, it didn't go away of course - the concept of an urban area around Manchester was still there, whether it had an elected authority or not. And of course the GM Boroughs had to refer to themselves as something - and of course there was still a GM Fire and Rescue, GM Police, etc, as well as non-state organisations such as the GM Football Association, I think (though others such as rugby and cricket had never seen a need to change their boundaries to match local government reform - and why not, because local government never matched historic counties in the first place - the county boroughs like Manchester, Liverpool, Oldham, etc existed outwith the jurisdiction of Lancashire County Council and no-one minded or said 'actually technically we're not Lancashire' - because local government <> geography.)
Anyway, the 1974-1986 GM authority wasn't the most harmonious of beasts: as you say, there was a lot of tension between Manchester and everyone else; and not actually a great deal of lamentation in the outer boroughs at its demise. The Manchester Labour Party in those days were hard left take-on-the government types, whereas Salford's Labour Party was prepared to work with the government - that, in fact, was how Salford Quays came about, much to the chagrin of the hard left in Manchester who saw their role as to fight Thatcher rather than necessarily to improve Manchester. That lot were removed in an internal putsch the mechanisms of which I am only vaguely aware about 1987 - and since then (possibly coincidentally), the GM authorities have been pretty good at getting on with each other, co-operating rather than competing (up to a point!). The structure we have now has sort of grown organically. We have a mayor who sits on top and is elected, but the districts retain more control than they did in the GMC days. The structure we have represents what GM wants, rather than what any part of it wants. There's still tension (Stockport has withdrawn from the joint plan), but less than there was.
[cont] Anyway, apologies for long rambling reply. It's an interesting question and the answer is definitely feelings-based, and I'm sure others in GM would have different perspectives.
As a final point, I think there was a remarkably similar story in Tyne and Wear.
Oh yes, the Mackems really enjoyed being under the thumb of Geordies.
The biggest pisser for them was the "Tyne and Wear Metro", which for decades went nowhere near Wearside.
This has carried on in a wider context, which was how they ended up with a "North of Tyne" mayor, when pre-1974 County Durham wanted nowt to do with it, fearing another power grab from The Toon.
And from my perspective, Gateshead is in County Durham. Just as it was when I was born there. That's my county. coz that's where I'm from. No Whitehall bureaucrat will tell me any different.
And of course, Middlesbrough will forever be a Small Town in Yorkshire.
Well yes, my point was that the Tyne and Wear county council was typified by (and apologies, I'm away from my own geography so my understanding is far hazier) Newcastle dominance over the others. But post 1986, the five Tyne and Wear authorities were pretty pragmatic about working together and bringing inward investment in to the area e.g. Nissan. They worked together better when they weren't forced to do so. And after 1993, joint working grew organically. The North of Tyne issue has gone differently to what happened in GM, I grant you.
And yes, there's no reason Gateshead should not be described as County Durham - whatever form local government might currently be taking. (There are reasons why you might want local government to reflect historic geography, and also reasons why you might want local government to reflect economic geography - my view tends to the latter but that shouldn't mean that, for example, Gateshead is not County Durham. And I am receptive to arguments the other way.)
One reason why Gateshead shouldn't be described as County Durham is that it hasn't been in said county for almost 50 years, and nobody under 40 thinks of it that way.
Get over it FFS.
Well Gateshead hasn't moved. Still between Tyne and Tees. Which is County Durham in the geographical, if not current political/administrative, sense.
Level the charge based on income as in other countries and increase it every year, so if you own a Bentley it's £25,000 per day or something nonsensical. Then after 10 years ban all cars.
Banning all cars would have the added benefit of reducing the number of phone masts we'd need. The less mobility the better.
ULEZ seems an example of how a policy becomes a political football.
We have
1) ULEZ itself - policy of all serious parties 2) ULEZ enforcement - by flat, large charges per day.
It seems that the moderate voices, calling for a better, less regressive taxation method are being left out of the debate.
Some people, including some here, are defending the enforcement in a totemic “if they hate it, we must love it” way.
Other countries have come up with better schemes. Based on vehicle type and mikes driven for instance. Systems that will smoothly adapt to congestion charging in a world where more and more cars are EVs. Systems that reward drivers of small cars.
ULEZ is by no means perfect. My point is that the Tories propose and implement ULEZ, then require the expansion of ULEZ. Then ask if they can take another authority to court because it expanded ULEZ as required by them.
Did they actually require an expansion of ULEZ? Or did they require emissions get cut? Because the two are completely different things.
See eg Manchester where the proposed charged-for zone was scrapped as it was (a) unfair and (b) wouldn't work anyway, and replaced with a better alternative.
Expansion of ULEZ = less pollution in the areas affected.
Which means that ANY HMG argument based on HMG reversing its policy of less pollution was sunk ab initio.
If HMG had argued on the efficiency or the social equity, that might have been different, I suppse. But that would have meant admitting that they weren't really friends of the reactionary backless glove merchants, and losing the latter's votes. .
Killing the first born in every household = less pollution.
Doesn't mean its government policy. Or a good idea.
If there's better ways to reach the objective, without a regressive tax, then that is a better alternative is it not?
In London, the vehicle pollution *is* killing the first born in every household right now, or not far off.
Don't exaggerate. The air quality in London is better than its been for centuries, the era of the Great Smog is long behind us.
That doesn't mean it can't improve even further, and we should try to improve it even further, but that doesn't mean either that regressive taxation is automatically the right way to do it.
Yes, I agree. The problem with ULEZ is that the solution it presents doesn't match the problem it purports to solve. GM's solution is far better. It's baffling how Sadiq Khan goes out of his way to pick fights he doesn't need to. Andy Burnham (who I was very wary of initially) - despite, realistically, having the GM mayoralty as long as he is the Labour candidate - goes out of his way to find voter-acceptable solutions and tries to keep as much of the electorate onside as possible; Sadiq Khan appears to hold large sections of his electorate in utter contempt. Hence AB at the last mayoral election in every single ward in GM. Even Bramhall South and Woodford, even Halebarns, even Bowdon.
Burnham has a trump card - civic pride. Manchester was once a global-scale industrial powerhouse. The city was full of industry, but the city corporation built the pneumatic power systems which enabled them. A proud city which thrived - that is what he is trying to do today.
The Bee Network and shamelessly sticking that bee on everything - worker bees striving individually to make the collective better. There is a buzz about the place, which as a Lancastrian from Greater Manchester is invigorating when I'm back there.
As usual in politics the question is what the opposition would do differently? You can't just be against when the policy is an ethos. You need a replacement ethos, and what would the Tory one be - each bee for himself?
You'd have thought London could do civic pride at least as well as Greater Manchester though. In fact, while I'm not sure how much of a strategic decision this was, or who is responsible, there has been a lot of success in creating a GM civic pride out of nothing. Manchester always had civic pride, as did Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, and so on ... but they are historically separate and independent towns, wary of one another. The idea of a GM civic pride is new. AB is in many ways quite a good fit for this, being out from the wild west of GM - Leigh is one of the least 'Mancunian' parts of the conurbation.
What would the opposition do differently? Search me. Though it should be said that the role of the GM mayor is not quite that of the London mayor, and districts hold slightly more power; and in the districts there are realistic alternatives to Labour who can make life difficult when difficult decisions have to be made (principally, at present, in planning.)
Also worth noting that the Labour party in GM is a pretty good version of the Labour Party. Granted, there are some on the far left, but to a large extent the party is consensual and driven by an ideology of making things work.
Greater Manchester was tried before - the outlying towns basically having the life sucked out of them by Manchester. Then the Tories abolished it and we had a few decades of disorganised chaos.
Perhaps the change in approach is general relief that there is once again a regional organisation which this time is trying to work with the metropolitan boroughs rather than against them?
Interesting one this, and there's no definitive answer.
Firstly, emotionally, much of GM IS still Lancashire/Cheshire/Yorkshire. But also GM. Some people are very much of the "Cheshire, actually" persuasion, others very much the opposite - some of this is through taste but much through ignorance of local government, history and geography and the relationships between them - a complex subject which lack of interest in is quite forgiveable. But I would say the majority are quite comfortable in overlapping identities: Altrincham can be Altrincham, Cheshire and also part of Greater Manchester. (Is this because there is no longer a Cheshire County Council not to be part of, I wonder? Probably not. Most people simply aren't that interested in that level of detail.)
When GM was abolished in 1986, it didn't go away of course - the concept of an urban area around Manchester was still there, whether it had an elected authority or not. And of course the GM Boroughs had to refer to themselves as something - and of course there was still a GM Fire and Rescue, GM Police, etc, as well as non-state organisations such as the GM Football Association, I think (though others such as rugby and cricket had never seen a need to change their boundaries to match local government reform - and why not, because local government never matched historic counties in the first place - the county boroughs like Manchester, Liverpool, Oldham, etc existed outwith the jurisdiction of Lancashire County Council and no-one minded or said 'actually technically we're not Lancashire' - because local government <> geography.)
Anyway, the 1974-1986 GM authority wasn't the most harmonious of beasts: as you say, there was a lot of tension between Manchester and everyone else; and not actually a great deal of lamentation in the outer boroughs at its demise. The Manchester Labour Party in those days were hard left take-on-the government types, whereas Salford's Labour Party was prepared to work with the government - that, in fact, was how Salford Quays came about, much to the chagrin of the hard left in Manchester who saw their role as to fight Thatcher rather than necessarily to improve Manchester. That lot were removed in an internal putsch the mechanisms of which I am only vaguely aware about 1987 - and since then (possibly coincidentally), the GM authorities have been pretty good at getting on with each other, co-operating rather than competing (up to a point!). The structure we have now has sort of grown organically. We have a mayor who sits on top and is elected, but the districts retain more control than they did in the GMC days. The structure we have represents what GM wants, rather than what any part of it wants. There's still tension (Stockport has withdrawn from the joint plan), but less than there was.
[cont] Anyway, apologies for long rambling reply. It's an interesting question and the answer is definitely feelings-based, and I'm sure others in GM would have different perspectives.
As a final point, I think there was a remarkably similar story in Tyne and Wear.
Oh yes, the Mackems really enjoyed being under the thumb of Geordies.
The biggest pisser for them was the "Tyne and Wear Metro", which for decades went nowhere near Wearside.
This has carried on in a wider context, which was how they ended up with a "North of Tyne" mayor, when pre-1974 County Durham wanted nowt to do with it, fearing another power grab from The Toon.
And from my perspective, Gateshead is in County Durham. Just as it was when I was born there. That's my county. coz that's where I'm from. No Whitehall bureaucrat will tell me any different.
And of course, Middlesbrough will forever be a Small Town in Yorkshire.
Well yes, my point was that the Tyne and Wear county council was typified by (and apologies, I'm away from my own geography so my understanding is far hazier) Newcastle dominance over the others. But post 1986, the five Tyne and Wear authorities were pretty pragmatic about working together and bringing inward investment in to the area e.g. Nissan. They worked together better when they weren't forced to do so. And after 1993, joint working grew organically. The North of Tyne issue has gone differently to what happened in GM, I grant you.
And yes, there's no reason Gateshead should not be described as County Durham - whatever form local government might currently be taking. (There are reasons why you might want local government to reflect historic geography, and also reasons why you might want local government to reflect economic geography - my view tends to the latter but that shouldn't mean that, for example, Gateshead is not County Durham. And I am receptive to arguments the other way.)
One reason why Gateshead shouldn't be described as County Durham is that it hasn't been in said county for almost 50 years, and nobody under 40 thinks of it that way.
Get over it FFS.
Well Gateshead hasn't moved. Still between Tyne and Tees. Which is County Durham in the geographical, if not current political/administrative, sense.
A goodly chunk of Northumberland is south of the Tyne and always has been as far as I know.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Oxford Street has bigger problems than traffic. It has collapsed as Britain's premier shopping destination and is now filled with American sweet shops which may or may not be money-laundering fronts when they are not ripping off tourists, and, well, souvenir shops that are ripping off tourists. Most of its famous stores are long gone. Pedestrianising Oxford Street would just move congestion, buses and taxis one street north because they will still need an east-west thoroughfare.
Pedestrianise it and regenerate it.
Nearly all the traffic on it is buses. I exaggerate only slightly.
It would make more sense to pedestrianise the quiet streets to the North, and leave Oxford Street as a giant bus lane.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
And they can continue destroying the planet and the lungs of our children.
Neither bicycles nor electric vehicles do either of those.
Get with the times.
EVs do - road building, especially thje kind you want. And the energy to power them. What happens when everyone wants one is an interesting question, as pointed out recently on here.
What happens when everyone want to use one? It helps turbocharge our transition to clean, renewable energy.
Currently the biggest issue with renewables is that they are based upon when the wind is blowing, or the tide is flowing, rather than when demand is happening. The wind blows just as much at night, but peak demand is early afternoon/evening and not night-time.
The great thing with vehicles is that they don't get charged when they're driving, especially with at-home charging they can get charged while the wind is blowing at night, offsetting energy demand to match energy supply.
Cars are the solution to climate change, not the problem, by allowing us to transition the rest of our energy into renewables and absorbing excess supply at off-peak levels.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
US cities do not seem a stunningly successful model to follow.
From the point of view of efficiency there probably are two poles to go for, each of which is a form of stable equilibrium. Either total full-on sprawl and decentralisation as epitomised by cities in the US South, and as Bart proposes (though I think he's enjoying being a tad provocative), or properly densified, walkable and cyclable cities with good public transport as seen in much of Europe. The trouble in Britain as with so many things is we have a bit of a halfway house.
From the point of view of aesthetics and sustainability though there's really no contest.
Absolutely, aesthetically and sustainably, sprawl with trees lining our roads, and houses having gardens, is far superior to concrete jungles and blocks of flats.
And no I don't advocate American levels of sprawl, I advocate British levels of sprawl.
Did you read the piece which you link to? What in it suggested to you that the new CalMac ferry might never set sail?
I did. Given the number of mistakes so far, the complexity of RORO ferries, and the political pressure on all this, I just wouldn't be surprised if there is something much more seriously wrong with them.
IANAE, but my friend in the MN is very cautious about working on ferries and has a lot of respect for the CalMac crews. I think MS Estonia has put the fear in him.
Assuming Dorries does step down and force a by election why shouldn't Labour contest it to win? After all Labour were second in Mid Bedfordshire in 2019 not the LDs and on the swing in the Selby by election would win it.
Starmer and the NEC will also not like the fact that LD leaflet is already trashing their candidate as well as the Tories and Dorries
Labour have every right to fight it, but it is an unnecessary reputational risk if they fail and boost to the Tories if they hold on as a consequence. Regardless of the fact they are in 2nd place the LDs are the ones most able to win. In fact without Lab campaigning it would be a slam dunk. If Lab are going to fight it you can't then expect the LDs not to fight them.
The best opportunity for the Tories is for the LDs and Lab to both fight it so I understand why you are keen Lab fight this seat.
I think it's just as likely, maybe more likely, that if the LDs and Lab both fight the seat, the Tories drop to third as it is the Tories squeezing through the middle to win. Coming third would be even more disastrous for the Tories than just losing badly but remaining second. So, I suggest, it may also be the worst opportunity for the Tories if both opposition parties fight.
I have seen this mentioned before. You? And it is a real possible outcome that I hadn't considered.
I can't believe however that is anyone's actual cunning plan.
It would however be a brilliant outcome. If it happened with the LDs winning I might actually explode.
Sounds like me!
We’ve only had one poll of the seat. It had the Tories on 24%. It could be well out. There are reasons to believe they could do better, but there are also reasons to believe they could do worse.
So, let’s say they’re going to get 24%. You don’t come through the middle to win on 24%. I don’t think a UK seat has ever been won on 24%. (I know there are cases in Papua New Guinea of winners under FPTP winning with less.)
Assuming Dorries does step down and force a by election why shouldn't Labour contest it to win? After all Labour were second in Mid Bedfordshire in 2019 not the LDs and on the swing in the Selby by election would win it.
Starmer and the NEC will also not like the fact that LD leaflet is already trashing their candidate as well as the Tories and Dorries
Labour have every right to fight it, but it is an unnecessary reputational risk if they fail and boost to the Tories if they hold on as a consequence. Regardless of the fact they are in 2nd place the LDs are the ones most able to win. In fact without Lab campaigning it would be a slam dunk. If Lab are going to fight it you can't then expect the LDs not to fight them.
The best opportunity for the Tories is for the LDs and Lab to both fight it so I understand why you are keen Lab fight this seat.
I think it's just as likely, maybe more likely, that if the LDs and Lab both fight the seat, the Tories drop to third as it is the Tories squeezing through the middle to win. Coming third would be even more disastrous for the Tories than just losing badly but remaining second. So, I suggest, it may also be the worst opportunity for the Tories if both opposition parties fight.
I have seen this mentioned before. You? And it is a real possible outcome that I hadn't considered.
I can't believe however that is anyone's actual cunning plan.
It would however be a brilliant outcome. If it happened with the LDs winning I might actually explode.
This is what happened in Eastleigh in 1994.
Although LDs started in second, and Labour weren't as far behind them as the LDs are in mid-Beds. Also the seat wasn't quite as rock solid safe C as Mid Beds.
Personally I would ban all cars except delivery vehicles (which should be electric anyhow) from Central London, I would do this at first by sticking a massive fee to enter Central London onto motorists and increase it every year.
A good starting point would be to pedestrian Oxford Street and environs, save for delivery vehicles. Would transform the area.
Good morning
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
TBF rather a lot of the rest of the UK is in conurbations bigger than Edinburgh.
Indeed, bigger is better. Gives more space for homes, gardens, roads, bike paths etc. 👍
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area. Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
Low density tends to lead to dispersal of services, meaning you have to drive everywhere. It's the big problem with many US cities.
So long as you spread out services rather than cram them all into the same space so everyone's trying to go to the same destination, that's not at all a problem. And if you sprawl you can have wider roads with dedicated cycle paths physically separated from both pedestrians and cars, so everyone can choose their own mode of transportation.
US cities do not seem a stunningly successful model to follow.
Why does every zealot on here seem to think the US is the only alternative? Its like the insanity that thinks that healthcare is either NHS or American.
I never said to follow US models.
New towns like Warrington and Milton Keynes which I positively mentioned as a successful, British model, would be completely out of place in America. They don't even understand what a roundabout is in America.
We should build more British new towns is my preference. Not go two-footed into American cities, I never suggested that.
In a hypothetical world in which Labour did actually win 500 seats as some of the polls say, what would happen to the Tories?
I worry about this. It's been playing on my mind.
Let's enter the world of evolution by natural selection. More precisely, the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, or drug resistant tumours.
Remove a hundred or so Tory MPs and what remains will still have some sort of ecological diversity. There will be the odd Lee Anderson or Suella type, a few dull but broadly thatcherite Sunaks, a handful of centrists and secret remainers and a few technocratic Tories nobody's heard of. What then grows back will be genetically similar to previous Tory parliamentary parties, and hopefully a little chastened with the populist right faction less powerful.
Get down to 50 though and the surviving MPs are likely to represent very Brexity, very right wing seats and be disproportionately of the Lee Anderson type (though not Lee himself, he would lose his seat). Either by natural disposition or through self-interest. What would then grow back might have quite dangerously mutant political DNA.
That might lock them out of power for a couple of terms, but it could mean that when things eventually swing back their way we would be faced with something much closer to the Trump GOP than we have even today.
I don't know why you think the 50 safest Tory seats are likely to be "of the Lee Anderson type" in that not just Anderson himself but most of his breed of "new" Conservatives who delivered Johnson his majority have relatively marginal seats.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think that depends on what you think is a "traditional" conservative. Sunak would likely keep his seat, and he is seen as a "traditionalist" - but on authoritarian instinct and culture war stuff he is much more radical than past Tories (some of whom even had libertarian instincts). The same for Rees-Mogg; he may seem like a "traditional" Tory, but his presence at the National Conservative Conference and his faith, family and flag politics is much more American than it is Tory. The whole "union" from the Conservative and Unionist Party seems to be faltering with this move - there is no way this new brand of conservative could keep NI and Scotland in the Union - and we're already seeing the rise of interest in Welsh independence.
Rees-Mogg wouldn't keep his seat in an election where the Tories were below 100 seats. Indeed, the predecessor seat was Labour until 2010 (boundary changes helped the Tories so it was a notional hold but marginal at that time).
He'll probably hold on with a more realistic General Election result on a heavily split Labour/Lib Dem vote, but he's not in ultra-safe territory.
I agree there are some traditional Tories in less traditional seats, and some new Tories in ultra-safe ones. What I'm saying is it seems unlikely, if the Tories were reduced to a rump, those remaining would be dispropotionately of the "Lee Anderson type" as Tim said.
If I have the time I might take a look at the safest 50 Tory seats, and who represents them. That wouldn't necessarily be the seats left of course, but it would be a start.
The other possibility of course is that a party down to 50 or fewer parliamentary seats would see a shift in power to non-MPs: London and Welsh assembly members, Scottish MSPs, councillors etc. That's certainly the case in the Lib Dems.
If the Tories were wiped on that scale, they'd be unlikely to have much presence elsewhere either - except the Lords, where they'd still be the largest party for some time. While it existed.
And if Starmer went for a fully elected Senate to replace the Lords the Tories in opposition could even win it in mid term protest vote against a Starmer government likely struggling with the economy and use that elected mandate in the upper house to block legislation from a Starmer government coming from the Commons
Did you read the piece which you link to? What in it suggested to you that the new CalMac ferry might never set sail?
I did. Given the number of mistakes so far, the complexity of RORO ferries, and the political pressure on all this, I just wouldn't be surprised if there is something much more seriously wrong with them.
IANAE, but my friend in the MN is very cautious about working on ferries and has a lot of respect for the CalMac crews. I think MS Estonia has put the fear in him.
I didn't realise how good the CalMac crew organisation was until I travelled on a (then, at least) Serco-operated Northlink ferry to Shetland
Comments
I have sympathy for the views from all parties on this one. I discussed it here with @NickPalmer a short while ago. We disagree on the topic but I suspect if he were a LD and I a Labour supporter we might both swap our views.
In a nut shell:
Labour wants the LDs to stop messing up their chances
LDs want Labour to stop messing up their chances
Torys want the LDs and Labour to mess up each other's chances.
Can anyone explain why an EV Hummer gets charged nothing to drive, while a Fiat 500 gets all the taxes (apart from ULEZ itself)?
We also see an increase in Ukraine's own capability that is not reliant on Western military support, in particular in it's production of drones.
Certainly the willingness of Russian soldiers to fight and die for a pointless imperialistic war continues to disappoint those of us hoping for a Ukrainian victory, but as long as China does not provide replacements for Russian losses in military equipment I am confident that Ukraine will prevail.
I really do not understand why anyone would want to drive into the centre of London or indeed Edinburgh
I used to travel to London on business quite frequently before I retired and I cannot ever recall taking my car into central London
However, I would just caution that the rest of the country is not London or Edinburgh and different solutions are required
If they did though yes most likely they would merge with ReformUK within a decade under FPTP much like the Canadian Tories merged with the populist Canadian Alliance ultimately after their 1993 landslide defeat to form today's Conservative Party of Canada
Are you going to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church on Resslova Street? The museum in the basement is worth it.
It was a bit spooky to have seen the film Anthropoid the week before we went - they used a fair bit of actual Prague in it.
The old synagogue isn’t far away from that as well.
It's probably true that the remaining seats would be strongly Brexit-leaning (as that's where some of the largest majorities are and the ones that will be hardest to dislodge). But the type of MP is, I suspect, more of the "traditional" Conservative type. Not exclusively, of course, but on balance.
I think the idea of the Conservatives being down to that level is a bit fanciful, by the way. As someone who remembers 1997, we're just not in a situation where the Conservatives will be at or below that level (when they won 165 seats).
This would fail.
The Tories would have a good time to work out what their core principles are and recreate a sane mass membership of Burkean liberals.
If this failed, then further answers would be needed. But the crystal ball gets cloudy at this point.
Train was actually okay, very Soviet but cheap and comfortable, and after a few glasses of vodka managed to sleep for a few hours.
There was a similar question as parking permit zones were rolled out across Edinburgh. The general response from the trades was the cost of the trade permits would be passed on, like all other costs, but that increased ease of parking across the new zones would mitigate that cost significantly.
Edinburgh has over half a million people crushed into a 46 square mile urban area.
Milton Keynes by comparison has a quarter of a million people spread out over an 89 square mile urban area.
Hell even Warrington is the same size as Edinburgh, but with only 177k people not over half a million in the same space.
Spread out. Its not as if there's a shortage of free space in Scotland for sprawl.
You'd have to issue permits to individual vehicles. Any such scheme would then no doubt then expand to encompass people who are "important".
Of course Princess Street has the trams and the City has changed beyond all recognition to my days, though no doubt I would still use the bus to commute if I had a central Edinburgh office job, unless I could work from home.
Get with the times.
But they do make a spectacular bang.
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1694295297776656598
A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage.
It just seems unfair that someone living in the ULEZ and driving to work say in Essex could get support, but someone living in Essex and driving into the ULEZ for work would not (all that as I understand it; I could be wrong).
I also remind you of my frequent complaint that rich people in the UK can commit any atrocity and are never punished.
The only problem with Jeremy Clarkson wrt Piers Badman is that he did not tie Piers upside-down to the Robin Reliant Space Shuttle before launch and film it from several angles
Again segregated roads with footpaths separated from both bikes and roads are perfectly safe for people to walk down. Having pedestrians having to battle with either cars or bikes because they don't have their own separate and safe land to use is more of an issue.
He'll probably hold on with a more realistic General Election result on a heavily split Labour/Lib Dem vote, but he's not in ultra-safe territory.
I agree there are some traditional Tories in less traditional seats, and some new Tories in ultra-safe ones. What I'm saying is it seems unlikely, if the Tories were reduced to a rump, those remaining would be dispropotionately of the "Lee Anderson type" as Tim said.
It's quite hard from the perspective of Northern England to see anything other than London getting almost all of the transport spend.
That's why so many people are leaving Edinburgh, and there is a massive east-to-west shift as we all escape to Livingston/Warrington.
Edinburgh has the lowest rates of cycling anywhere in Scotland due to all the tenements and proximity of our workplaces, and rumours of glorious parks and an extinct volcano are completely unfounded.
Indeed, I walked across North Bridge yesterday and there wasn't another soul. The city is dead, killed by the anti-motoring lobby.
Actually a series of criss-crossing road tunnels under London would be great, once most cars and buses are EVs (now it would generate a lot of polluted air underground). Then pedestrianise the whole of the centre sauf riverains.
The other possibility of course is that a party down to 50 or fewer parliamentary seats would see a shift in power to non-MPs: London and Welsh assembly members, Scottish MSPs, councillors etc. That's certainly the case in the Lib Dems.
Which is a good quality for a museum to possess.
But post 1986, the five Tyne and Wear authorities were pretty pragmatic about working together and bringing inward investment in to the area e.g. Nissan. They worked together better when they weren't forced to do so. And after 1993, joint working grew organically.
The North of Tyne issue has gone differently to what happened in GM, I grant you.
And yes, there's no reason Gateshead should not be described as County Durham - whatever form local government might currently be taking. (There are reasons why you might want local government to reflect historic geography, and also reasons why you might want local government to reflect economic geography - my view tends to the latter but that shouldn't mean that, for example, Gateshead is not County Durham. And I am receptive to arguments the other way.)
[PS it is incredibly difficult to build things underground in London. Everything is criss-crossed by electricity lines, sewage pipes, etc. Look at how long it took to build Tube lines]
Unless you gain in efficiency elsewhere, the economic cost of maintaining this infrastructure acts as a permanent drag on your economy. City centres are far more efficient in terms of services created for a given support cost.
Roads in particular are incredibly expensive & have to be continuously maintained. A dual carriageway A-road in the UK runs at about £40million / mile to build & about £200k / mile / year to maintain.
Even if you discount the initial construction cost, that maintenance burden is an ongoing cost. Fine if the economic benefits a road brings (and those are obviously very real!) outweigh the costs, but at some point you reach a level of sprawl that the businesses & dwellings along a given road cannot possible pay the taxes required to pay for the ongoing maintenance of their road & other services.
Large swathes of the US are already at this point: In some cases these areas survive by creaming off some of the tax take from higher productivity city centres, others are in inexorable decline. Fortunately the US is rich enough to cope - but either they subsidise the exurbs or the exurbs decline; these places are (mostly) incapable of paying their own way economically.
To take just one example, the US share of the world PCB market has fallen from 30% to 4%.
https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-crawls-toward-rebuilding-frail-pcb-industry/
It's the same picture across the board for electronics manufacturing - Biden has acted on that.
Trump's proposed tariff would do nothing to address it.
Get over it FFS.
BBC News - New CalMac ferries delay after safety changes ordered
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-66585909
Big, well organised metro cities would have more clout. Greater Manchester....... and Greater Leeds, Greater Newcastle, Greater Sheffield, each with a powerful mayor.
I can't believe however that is anyone's actual cunning plan.
It would however be a brilliant outcome. If it happened with the LDs winning I might actually explode.
Edit: Ah no. That was the earlier rumour, but now confirmed as the S-400.
From the point of view of aesthetics and sustainability though there's really no contest.
https://www.aveillant.com/technology/
Anyway, the point I was making was that as someone living at the end of the Central Line in West London for 4 years, I only drove into town on one occasion. It should be the exception, not the norm, for people heading into central London.
It would make more sense to pedestrianise the quiet streets to the North, and leave Oxford Street as a giant bus lane.
Currently the biggest issue with renewables is that they are based upon when the wind is blowing, or the tide is flowing, rather than when demand is happening. The wind blows just as much at night, but peak demand is early afternoon/evening and not night-time.
The great thing with vehicles is that they don't get charged when they're driving, especially with at-home charging they can get charged while the wind is blowing at night, offsetting energy demand to match energy supply.
Cars are the solution to climate change, not the problem, by allowing us to transition the rest of our energy into renewables and absorbing excess supply at off-peak levels.
When I hold my finger down on the picture on my phone, I can see it flutter by
And no I don't advocate American levels of sprawl, I advocate British levels of sprawl.
IANAE, but my friend in the MN is very cautious about working on ferries and has a lot of respect for the CalMac crews. I think MS Estonia has put the fear in him.
We’ve only had one poll of the seat. It had the Tories on 24%. It could be well out. There are reasons to believe they could do better, but there are also reasons to believe they could do worse.
So, let’s say they’re going to get 24%. You don’t come through the middle to win on 24%. I don’t think a UK seat has ever been won on 24%. (I know there are cases in Papua New Guinea of winners under FPTP winning with less.)
Although LDs started in second, and Labour weren't as far behind them as the LDs are in mid-Beds. Also the seat wasn't quite as rock solid safe C as Mid Beds.
But given current polling, quite possible.
was pretty little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fttPV0auKY
Hmm, that singer looks a bit like Bonnie Prince Charlie.
I never said to follow US models.
New towns like Warrington and Milton Keynes which I positively mentioned as a successful, British model, would be completely out of place in America. They don't even understand what a roundabout is in America.
We should build more British new towns is my preference. Not go two-footed into American cities, I never suggested that.
Playing things fiscally tight is probably best to keep inflation from rising.