- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
None of them are a problem so long as there is smart and sensible investment.
Net zero - if you mean don't fly, don't drive etc that's just stupid and will never work. If you mean invest in clean cars, clean electricity, clean flights etc that does work.
LTNs - if you mean just stick up barriers on existing through routes without any alternatives, that doesn't work. If you mean build new roads as through routes and leave roads to be residential LTN roads that's entirely reasonable.
20mph - if you mean just make the limit 20mph and leave it at that, that's stupid. If you mean invest in faster 40-70mph through roads and leave LTN side streets as 20mph, that's entirely reasonable.
The problem isn't any of those as an ambition. The problem is hypocrites who want to do it cheaply, without the necessary investment to make it work.
Invest in clean technologies, invest in more roads, invest in solutions, then you can have those desired outcomes. Don't do so, there's no free lunches.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
I doubt anyone thinks Labour will be in power longer than New Labour, which was in power (unless you consider Brown not new labour) for 13 years. 8-10 would do them nicely I reckon.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
Absolutely.
Invest in clean technologies and you can have net zero.
Invest in new roads and you can have LTNs and 20mph side streets.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
I like this argument! A car journey is a journey between two points. If the aim is to reduce the probability of injury, then what combination of speed and time would do this? IIUC the probability of child injury scales linearly to time, but non-linearly to speed. So doubling the journey time and halving the speed is not neutral.
0mph. The rest of time.
Still not risk free. At some point (could be in 500 years, could be tomorrow) a jogger would run into it and knock themselves out.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
None of them are a problem so long as there is smart and sensible investment.
Net zero - if you mean don't fly, don't drive etc that's just stupid and will never work. If you mean invest in clean cars, clean electricity, clean flights etc that does work.
LTNs - if you mean just stick up barriers on existing through routes without any alternatives, that doesn't work. If you mean build new roads as through routes and leave roads to be residential LTN roads that's entirely reasonable.
20mph - if you mean just make the limit 20mph and leave it at that, that's stupid. If you mean invest in faster 40-70mph through roads and leave LTN side streets as 20mph, that's entirely reasonable.
The problem isn't any of those as an ambition. The problem is hypocrites who want to do it cheaply, without the necessary investment to make it work.
Invest in clean technologies, invest in more roads, invest in solutions, then you can have those desired outcomes. Don't do so, there's no free lunches.
The problem is that “invest” is a foreign word to British ears. Like “infrastructure” and “long term”.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
Not sure if you are trolling or simply confused, but there is no way that your statement about driving more slowly increasing the chances of a collision by 50% is correct. By your logic a car driving at the speed of light should have a near zero chance of hitting a pedestrian while a car travelling at 1mph would be 30x more likely to hit a pedestrian than one travelling at 30mph. For a car making a specific journey and a pedestrian making a journey crossing the car's path the speed at which the car is travelling is irrelevant to the probability of the vehicle and pedestrian's path crossing. What determines the likelihood of an accident is the ability of both to take corrective action to avoid the collision. This is unambiguously decreasing in the speed of the vehicle.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
I'm still driving my 22 year old BMW. It's ULEZ compliant and knows me so well that it basically drives itself. Sometimes all the way to the west coast of Ireland. I just sit back. Not a problem. About 30 mpg.
Where do you go to in the West of Ireland?
My house in Co Galway. It's set in 20 acres, no neighbours, no noise, no pollution, brilliant skies (I have a telescope). Peace. It's a million miles from my flat in Barnes.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
I like this argument! A car journey is a journey between two points. If the aim is to reduce the probability of injury, then what combination of speed and time would do this? IIUC the probability of child injury scales linearly to time, but non-linearly to speed. So doubling the journey time and halving the speed is not neutral.
0mph. The rest of time.
You may have stumbled upon the objective some are setting....
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
I like this argument! A car journey is a journey between two points. If the aim is to reduce the probability of injury, then what combination of speed and time would do this? IIUC the probability of child injury scales linearly to time, but non-linearly to speed. So doubling the journey time and halving the speed is not neutral.
0mph. The rest of time.
Indeed. As you say, the other side of the ledger must be considered. To mangle two analogies, speed reduction is the Laffer curve of the Greens (or whoever did this).
Latest Lib Dem leaflet at Mid Beds quotes the polls commissioned by Labour and headlines "LIB Dem SURGE", with a bar chart Lib Dems up 7, Cons up 5 and Labour down the bottom on 1!!!! And so it goes on. We have another 4 weeks of this!!!!
Latest Lib Dem leaflet at Mid Beds quotes the polls commissioned by Labour and headlines "LIB Dem SURGE", with a bar chart Lib Dems up 7, Cons up 5 and Labour down the bottom on 1!!!! And so it goes on. We have another 4 weeks of this!!!!
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
Batteries will not store enough for a multi-week-long high pressure (and may not be as environmental campaigners are making out - waste from worn-out batteries will be an issue). Tidal and nuclear should provide the baseload.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
The modern car changes gear automatically. You must have an old banger.
I do, yes, I decided about eight years ago that I've no intention to buy a new petrol/diesel vehicle until I can get an electric one so I'm keeping my now 13 year old vehicle until that's either no longer an option, or I can get an electric vehicle which will hopefully be in about 12 months time.
Though as recently as 2019 most new cars were still manual transmission and many new cars sold today are still manuals. And many people don't have new cars of course, like myself.
Ah ok. Although I had the same car for 30 years till Ulez forced me to change it last year and it was still auto. Manual feels quite exotic to me. What do you have btw? Is it a Hillman Imp?
Kia Ceed.
When I bought it, it had a 7 year warranty, which at the time was quite unusual other cars still had a 3 year warranty.
Very well built vehicle, so no reason not to still be driving it.
Kia Ceed. Ok. I have a red Golf GTI now. Let's see if we can spot each other on the M1 at some point.
If you're ever on the M6 it would be more likely.
Hard to imagine what twist of fate could cause me to be on that - but noted. Banana Yellow Kia Ceed. Cherry Red Golf GTI.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
None of them are a problem so long as there is smart and sensible investment.
Net zero - if you mean don't fly, don't drive etc that's just stupid and will never work. If you mean invest in clean cars, clean electricity, clean flights etc that does work.
LTNs - if you mean just stick up barriers on existing through routes without any alternatives, that doesn't work. If you mean build new roads as through routes and leave roads to be residential LTN roads that's entirely reasonable.
20mph - if you mean just make the limit 20mph and leave it at that, that's stupid. If you mean invest in faster 40-70mph through roads and leave LTN side streets as 20mph, that's entirely reasonable.
The problem isn't any of those as an ambition. The problem is hypocrites who want to do it cheaply, without the necessary investment to make it work.
Invest in clean technologies, invest in more roads, invest in solutions, then you can have those desired outcomes. Don't do so, there's no free lunches.
Technology has moved forward in the past because the newer technology has rendered the old obsolete. Horse and carriage vs. motor car, diesel trains vs. coal, then electric. Where the state has intervened, it hasn't been an unqualified success - example intervening on behalf of diesel, later to regret this due to particulate emissions. What you're talking about is mass 'picking of winners' and spending of taxpayers' money accordingly, and I'm a bit surprised that as a libertarian you're so insoucient about it.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Gas backup is incredibly cheap.
And do remember that tidal produces different amounts according to where you are in the tidal cycle. So, when the tide is turning (which will be at roughly the same time for the whole country), it won't be generating at all.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
"Three extra minutes opportunity to hit a child"
Justification for doing 100mph, I suppose. This debate is getting increasingly entertaining.
Well, if we want to be absurd, then if all cars travelled just below the speed of light, the risk of any collisions would be tiny, as the journey times would be to all intents and purposes instant.
But if there was a collision, man, it would release some energy....
The slow moving child, aging faster than the fast-moving driver, would be an adult before any collision, so your scenario would eliminate child deaths in RTCs completely
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
None of them are a problem so long as there is smart and sensible investment.
Net zero - if you mean don't fly, don't drive etc that's just stupid and will never work. If you mean invest in clean cars, clean electricity, clean flights etc that does work.
LTNs - if you mean just stick up barriers on existing through routes without any alternatives, that doesn't work. If you mean build new roads as through routes and leave roads to be residential LTN roads that's entirely reasonable.
20mph - if you mean just make the limit 20mph and leave it at that, that's stupid. If you mean invest in faster 40-70mph through roads and leave LTN side streets as 20mph, that's entirely reasonable.
The problem isn't any of those as an ambition. The problem is hypocrites who want to do it cheaply, without the necessary investment to make it work.
Invest in clean technologies, invest in more roads, invest in solutions, then you can have those desired outcomes. Don't do so, there's no free lunches.
Technology has moved forward in the past because the newer technology has rendered the old obsolete. Horse and carriage vs. motor car, diesel trains vs. coal, then electric. Where the state has intervened, it hasn't been an unqualified success - example intervening on behalf of diesel, later to regret this due to particulate emissions. What you're talking about is mass 'picking of winners' and spending of taxpayers' money accordingly, and I'm a bit surprised that as a libertarian you're so insoucient about it.
Technology has moved forward. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of coal power. Electric vehicles are ultimately replacing petrol ones, whether the state acts or not.
The state putting a thumb on the scale when it comes to externalities is quite reasonable, that's not the state "picking winners", its taxing the externality which means the market prices the externality.
Zealots who want people other than them never to fly, that's never going to happen. Where the state can play a sensible role is in encouraging clean technologies to be developed, by either funding science and technology or creating incentives to allow the space for the better technologies to be developed. That's entirely in fitting with liberal thinking.
For aviation for instance, our current taxation is completely absurd. A flight flying transatlantic 100 passengers while emitting 100 tonnes of CO2 will pay half the tax of a flight flying transatlantic 200 passengers which emits 50 tonnes of CO2. That makes no sense. The latter has 1/4 the emissions per passenger than the former, yet passengers on both have the same tax payable, the latter should should have their taxes cut.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Gas backup is incredibly cheap.
And do remember that tidal produces different amounts according to where you are in the tidal cycle. So, when the tide is turning (which will be at roughly the same time for the whole country), it won't be generating at all.
This is surprisingly not the case. Some selected high tide times. Cape Wrath 10:42 Hull 09:13 Dover 14:03 Penzance 07:42 Liverpool 14:11 It's also a lot easier to timeshift energy for a couple of hours - to cover the slack periods in a tidal cycle - then it is to store energy for weeks for a once-in-a-decade prolonged period of high pressure at the winter solstice.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Gas backup is incredibly cheap.
And do remember that tidal produces different amounts according to where you are in the tidal cycle. So, when the tide is turning (which will be at roughly the same time for the whole country), it won't be generating at all.
Er, tidal does take some time to pass around the UK, though not enough to [edit} fill the cycle, but see LostPassword. On the other hand, some schemes rely on impounded storage, which spreads the generation around the 12hr cycle.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
The recent auction failed - and projects at the moment are being put on hold, because the current auction price no longer reflects the production (and installation) costs of an offshore wind turbine.
While the government has continued to try and push down the auction price steel and other costs have transpired to make the current office price insufficient to cover the costs and risks involved.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
The cost of wind power is almost entirely in the cost of construction, so it's levelised equivalent cost is very sensitive to the interest rate paid on the debt taken out to pay for that construction.
With interest rates going up a lot recently this makes wind a lot more expensive in a finance sense, even were the cost of construction unchanged.
This is less of a problem for a gas plant where most of the cost overall is in posting for the fuel, and so you don't need to carry so much debt to finance it.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
The recent auction failed - and projects at the moment are being put on hold, because the current auction price no longer reflects the production (and installation) costs of an offshore wind turbine.
While the government has continued to try and push down the auction price steel and other costs have transpired to make the current office price insufficient to cover the costs and risks involved.
Which doesn't mean that gas is cheaper as I understand it, because the auction price is I believe less than the gas price anyway. If the auction price were set at the gas price, the auction wouldn't have failed, but that's the thing with auctions and setting reserves, sometimes things fail but then you just need to adjust and go again.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
Your honour, I was driving past the school at 80mph in order to quarter the amount of time I spent endangering children. As the security camera footage show clearly, I didn't actually strike the child crossing the road, it was the bow air shock that wafted him airborne. After applying the brakes and coming to a standstill, I reversed the 450ft to find the child shaken but apparently unhurt in the upper branches of the oak tree
Speed is relative, so you could argue that really you were stationary while the child was moving towards you at 80mph
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Gas backup is incredibly cheap.
And do remember that tidal produces different amounts according to where you are in the tidal cycle. So, when the tide is turning (which will be at roughly the same time for the whole country), it won't be generating at all.
Yes. There are gaps in tidal supply, but predictable and short gaps. And I'm not sure if this makes a difference but I think the tide turns at different times according to lattitude?
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free. Gas costs little to construct but the fuel costs money. It’s like lease or buy. Cheaper overall to buy your new car outright, but easier up-front to lease it.
Tidal of course is an extreme example of this. Horrendous cost to construct but nearly free once done, excepting maintenance.
But lucky guy has his beliefs. I’d say arguably the most unshakeably ideological member on PB, excepting perhaps BJO (whose ideology is mainly hating Starmer).
EDIT: how could I forget HYUFD? The gold medalist.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
"Three extra minutes opportunity to hit a child"
Justification for doing 100mph, I suppose. This debate is getting increasingly entertaining.
Well, if we want to be absurd, then if all cars travelled just below the speed of light, the risk of any collisions would be tiny, as the journey times would be to all intents and purposes instant.
But if there was a collision, man, it would release some energy....
If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
EVs will sort that.
Agreed, many of those issues are legacy issues, but they're real legacy issues for today.
And if you care about the environment for example then EV at 20 or EV at 30 is clean either way. But petrol at 20 can be less clean than petrol at 30.
Of course that's for cruising. Rapid and repeated acceleration/deceleration or stopping and starting is far worse than which speed you are doing.
Any Council that thinks its a good idea to put a red light on a roundabout, except major ones like motorway junctions, needs to be sent on a one way rocket to Mars.
Uh, how fuel efficient is the Martian rocket idea?
Well I planned for it being one way, so cuts off half the fuel you'd need for a round trip.
Other destinations are available. I was going to say the sun originally, but thought I'd mix it up.
The sun is at least downhill. And you don't even have to hit the target: anything inside Mercury's orbit is likely going to need factor 5000000 sun cream.
Actually it's very much uphill from our frame of reference..
It would take less than half the energy required to reach the sun from earth, for a launch from earth to leave the solar system completely.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
"Three extra minutes opportunity to hit a child"
Justification for doing 100mph, I suppose. This debate is getting increasingly entertaining.
Well, if we want to be absurd, then if all cars travelled just below the speed of light, the risk of any collisions would be tiny, as the journey times would be to all intents and purposes instant.
But if there was a collision, man, it would release some energy....
If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
I wouldn’t rule out one final throw of the dice by the backbenchers. Probably unsuccessful this time, like Major’s bastards, but that could push the ratings a touch lower.
Your honour, I was driving past the school at 80mph in order to quarter the amount of time I spent endangering children. As the security camera footage show clearly, I didn't actually strike the child crossing the road, it was the bow air shock that wafted him airborne. After applying the brakes and coming to a standstill, I reversed the 450ft to find the child shaken but apparently unhurt in the upper branches of the oak tree
I was once nicked for doing just under a ton on the motorway. At the time my windscreen was filthy so I wanted to get off the motorway more quickly as I could barely see through the tree sap. I did not mention this to the officers.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
He noting merely that the last auction failed, and building an argument on that.
Which ignores the fact that UK maximum strike price for the auctions has been steadily dropping - but government failed to allow for the last year's spike in construction and financing costs.
Wind is still cheap, and likely to get cheaper as the technology develops, but there's been a short term uptick in development costs.
It will never compete on price with (eg) Saudi solar power, of course.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
"Three extra minutes opportunity to hit a child"
Justification for doing 100mph, I suppose. This debate is getting increasingly entertaining.
Well, if we want to be absurd, then if all cars travelled just below the speed of light, the risk of any collisions would be tiny, as the journey times would be to all intents and purposes instant.
But if there was a collision, man, it would release some energy....
If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
So you would kill 6 billion people.
Cyclists can be very reckless at times.
Would probably happen due to running a red light, although excusable given it would look decidedly blue gamma.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
"Three extra minutes opportunity to hit a child"
Justification for doing 100mph, I suppose. This debate is getting increasingly entertaining.
Well, if we want to be absurd, then if all cars travelled just below the speed of light, the risk of any collisions would be tiny, as the journey times would be to all intents and purposes instant.
But if there was a collision, man, it would release some energy....
If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
So you would kill 6 billion people.
Cyclists can be very reckless at times.
Would probably happen due to running a red light, although excusable given it would look decidedly blue gamma.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
But core support used to be about 30%, David. It's now 25%.
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free...
Not really.
The marginal cost of an additional kWh is close to free, but maintenance and replacement costs have to be factored in over the turbine life.
Offshore in particular has significant ongoing maintenance and replacement costs - wind turbines don't last anywhere near as long as tidal. At least 1p per kWh, I think ?
I don't believe these polls. Tory figure way too low, Labour figure way too high.
Lab, low forties. Tories around 30 is my bet. The margin as we speak is, in my view 10 to 12 points
Why do you think that? Your own research (methodology?) or finger in the air?
For reference, the Conservative VI hasn't been above 30 since June. Every one of the last 68 polls has put them below (65 times) or on (3 times) 30%.
Mine is an entirely unscientific view, but one based on historical precedent and Labour's inherent ineptitude and ability to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
EVs will sort that.
Agreed, many of those issues are legacy issues, but they're real legacy issues for today.
And if you care about the environment for example then EV at 20 or EV at 30 is clean either way. But petrol at 20 can be less clean than petrol at 30.
Of course that's for cruising. Rapid and repeated acceleration/deceleration or stopping and starting is far worse than which speed you are doing.
Any Council that thinks its a good idea to put a red light on a roundabout, except major ones like motorway junctions, needs to be sent on a one way rocket to Mars.
Uh, how fuel efficient is the Martian rocket idea?
Well I planned for it being one way, so cuts off half the fuel you'd need for a round trip.
Other destinations are available. I was going to say the sun originally, but thought I'd mix it up.
The sun is at least downhill. And you don't even have to hit the target: anything inside Mercury's orbit is likely going to need factor 5000000 sun cream.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
Don't forget ULEZ, like 20mph is also very bad communism, both detested by honest yeoman Tories since day one.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
As indicated in a post to Bart, there will be some roads where a higher speed might be more efficient, so I'm not being absolute about this, but cmon, you're talking crap.
Secondly, the stuff about accidents is egregious bullshit. Stop and think about it. Parked cars take an infinite amount of time on their "journey" but the number of children they run over is (as good as) zero. Slower speeds means you're more likely to stop before you hit something in the road, not just that if you do hit it you're going slower. Use your brain.
Lastly, not all journeys are taken on roads that change from 30 to 20. Any stretch on still-30 roads, or faster ones will destroy that 50% increase. I did a calculation on here a few days ago, late at night, for a mid-Wales journey that someone else suggested. It went from 47 to 51 minutes. That's 8.5% up.
I will generously assume you are being wilfully stupid.
For the portion of a journey that used to be driven at 30 mph, it can now only be driven at 20 mph. Let us say it was 3 miles. It will now take 9 minutes instead of 6 minutes. That is three extra minutes the car is creating pollution; three extra minutes opportunity for a child to have a collission with it.
I am not evangelical about keeping 30 mph limits. But to fail to address the other side of the ledger from a change is just ignoring that there are consequences.
I like this argument! A car journey is a journey between two points. If the aim is to reduce the probability of injury, then what combination of speed and time would do this? IIUC the probability of child injury scales linearly to time, but non-linearly to speed. So doubling the journey time and halving the speed is not neutral.
If the risk is only time related, then presumably you would want the sum of time x area at risk.
The area at risk will be everywhere within the stopping distance of the car.
A simple sum then: 1mile at 30mph. Time = 120sec. Stopping distance = 23m (officially). 1mile at 20mph. Time = 180sec. Stopping distance = 12m (officially).
Area at risk for a car 1.8m wide: 30mph -> 120 x 23 x 1.8 = 4968sm^2 20mph -> 180 x 12 x 1.8 = 3888sm^2
Of course, you might want to segregate that into 'serious risk' which could be defined as the area that might get hit at more than 20mph. Which would make the results rather different...
The real question is, NICE style - what life is gained by the driver giving up a minute?
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
I wouldn’t rule out one final throw of the dice by the backbenchers. Probably unsuccessful this time, like Major’s bastards, but that could push the ratings a touch lower.
Some will try, no doubt, but I don't think it'll come off because too many of them know they can't effectively manage a transition, that there's no-one who could obviously make things better (Mordaunt?) but several who the membership could elect via a minority of MPs, a la Truss, and could make things a whole lot worse. Again.
Plus, timings. A leadership election takes a minimum of about 4 weeks but realistically at least 6. That either takes out a whole load of parliamentary time navel-gazing when they should be governing, or is done over the summer recess, which would then give the new leader very little time to prepare for the general election campaign - and the Party no time to recover if it gets it wrong.
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free...
Not really.
The marginal cost of an additional kWh is close to free, but maintenance and replacement costs have to be factored in over the turbine life.
Offshore in particular has significant ongoing maintenance and replacement costs - wind turbines don't last anywhere near as long as tidal. At least 1p per kWh, I think ?
Tidal systems have, to date, either been extremely expensive (massively built) or not lasted very long.
The problem is that unless designed carefully, the excess energy in a storm does a nice job of tearing your tidal system to bits.
Two good answers - put the tide turbines below wave action, in a deep channel. The other, in tidal pond schemes, is to shield the turbines with the body of the pond. Neither has been implemented at scale, yet, though.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
He noting merely that the last auction failed, and building an argument on that.
Which ignores the fact that UK maximum strike price for the auctions has been steadily dropping - but government failed to allow for the last year's spike in construction and financing costs.
Wind is still cheap, and likely to get cheaper as the technology develops, but there's been a short term uptick in development costs.
It will never compete on price with (eg) Saudi solar power, of course.
I think you and TimS are being a little evasive - Barty is claiming (it would appear on the basis of the No. 1 Google search result) that wind is cheaper than gas - that is absolutely 100% untrue over the long term, yet you both seem to want to foster this delusion.
Barty is getting his info from Carbon Brief - this piece fact checks them:
"One therm equals 29.3071 KWh, so the January gas price of around 150p/therm equates to about £51/MWh, which is substantially less than the price of electricity. Since then gas prices have dropped further to 120 pence.
Evans claims that energy bills are high because of the price of gas, but clearly they would be much higher if we all had to use electricity instead.
TRICK 2
But the real dishonesty is his failure to mention that offshore and even onshore wind power is considerably more expensive than gas-fired power, despite the currently high price of gas.
Market prices of electricity averaged £121/MWh, and this price usually reflects the price of gas-fired power. However offshore wind farms subsidised under CfDs were paid an average of £167/MWh.
And offshore wind subsidised via ROCs, which account for about half of the offshore sector, earn £100/MWh on top of the market price, a total of £221/MWh.
The weighted average cost for all offshore farms was therefore £194/MWh.
Even onshore wind farms receive a subsidy of £52/MWh on top of the market price.
And these costs don’t even include the extra costs incurred by the grid associated with intermittent wind power.
In other words, even in the midst of a global gas crisis, gas generation is still cheaper than wind by orders of magnitude. At normal gas prices, there isn't even a comparison.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
EVs will sort that.
Agreed, many of those issues are legacy issues, but they're real legacy issues for today.
And if you care about the environment for example then EV at 20 or EV at 30 is clean either way. But petrol at 20 can be less clean than petrol at 30.
Of course that's for cruising. Rapid and repeated acceleration/deceleration or stopping and starting is far worse than which speed you are doing.
Any Council that thinks its a good idea to put a red light on a roundabout, except major ones like motorway junctions, needs to be sent on a one way rocket to Mars.
Uh, how fuel efficient is the Martian rocket idea?
Well I planned for it being one way, so cuts off half the fuel you'd need for a round trip.
Other destinations are available. I was going to say the sun originally, but thought I'd mix it up.
The sun is at least downhill. And you don't even have to hit the target: anything inside Mercury's orbit is likely going to need factor 5000000 sun cream.
Actually it's very much uphill from our frame of reference..
It would take less than half the energy required to reach the sun from earth, for a launch from earth to leave the solar system completely.
Couldn't understand your post, till I read that and realised that you're at the Earth's orbital speed when you launch, pretty much, and need to - effectively use retrorockets or gravitational braking around a planet to kill most of that speed to drop into a much lower orbit.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
Labour need to win at least two really to back up that sort of polling position - one won't cut it.
They are very heavy favourites in Rutherglen. Anything other than a win would be very poor for Labour and strongly suggest that they aren't going to make appreciable progress in Scotland. It would be up near the top of their list of targets to win from the SNP even without a by-election, and the circumstances of the by-election are bad for the SNP, so it'd be really bad for Labour not to win. It's a different problem for them than Tories doing well... but it's hard to get a majority if they are treading water in Scotland.
If Labour do get Rutherglen, but fail to get either of the others, you do have to colour me very sceptical that polls like the Deltapoll are at all realistic. Like Rutherglen, both are by-elections brought about in very unfavourable circumstances for the incumbent (by which I mean caused by disgrace rather than death). Neither are shoo-ins - big majority in Tamworth, Lib Dems fighting hard in Mid Beds. But getting neither really wouldn't be okay for Labour.
I'm not saying holding off Labour twice would mean Sunak can start making firm plans for his second term and Starmer may as well give up... just that it'd all suddenly look a lot more nip and tuck than these 20%+ lead polls would suggest.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
exactly, usual ill thought out garbage policy using extremely dodgy statistics that are the opposite of reality.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
The modern car changes gear automatically. You must have an old banger.
I do, yes, I decided about eight years ago that I've no intention to buy a new petrol/diesel vehicle until I can get an electric one so I'm keeping my now 13 year old vehicle until that's either no longer an option, or I can get an electric vehicle which will hopefully be in about 12 months time.
Though as recently as 2019 most new cars were still manual transmission and many new cars sold today are still manuals. And many people don't have new cars of course, like myself.
Ah ok. Although I had the same car for 30 years till Ulez forced me to change it last year and it was still auto. Manual feels quite exotic to me. What do you have btw? Is it a Hillman Imp?
Kia Ceed.
When I bought it, it had a 7 year warranty, which at the time was quite unusual other cars still had a 3 year warranty.
Very well built vehicle, so no reason not to still be driving it.
Kia Ceed. Ok. I have a red Golf GTI now. Let's see if we can spot each other on the M1 at some point.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
Maybe. Sunak started out unusually badly but perhaps that means he is not fundamentally popular and can fall lower than other leaders. Truss was kicked out so quickly I suspect her final net favourability rating of -51 flatters her significantly. John Major, who was widely liked initially and won an election, ended up around - 60 at his trough. For the last four months Sunak has lost about 5-6 points of net favourability each month, if that drop doesn't level off then he will be at -55 in just two months. I doubt it will happen that quickly but I think it entirely possible that Sunak plumbs those depths.
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free. Gas costs little to construct but the fuel costs money. It’s like lease or buy. Cheaper overall to buy your new car outright, but easier up-front to lease it.
Tidal of course is an extreme example of this. Horrendous cost to construct but nearly free once done, excepting maintenance.
But lucky guy has his beliefs. I’d say arguably the most unshakeably ideological member on PB, excepting perhaps BJO (whose ideology is mainly hating Starmer).
EDIT: how could I forget HYUFD? The gold medalist.
You give me more credit than I deserve - I'm not ideological at all; I believe in whatever it takes to get the job done.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
EVs will sort that.
Agreed, many of those issues are legacy issues, but they're real legacy issues for today.
And if you care about the environment for example then EV at 20 or EV at 30 is clean either way. But petrol at 20 can be less clean than petrol at 30.
Of course that's for cruising. Rapid and repeated acceleration/deceleration or stopping and starting is far worse than which speed you are doing.
Any Council that thinks its a good idea to put a red light on a roundabout, except major ones like motorway junctions, needs to be sent on a one way rocket to Mars.
Uh, how fuel efficient is the Martian rocket idea?
Well I planned for it being one way, so cuts off half the fuel you'd need for a round trip.
Other destinations are available. I was going to say the sun originally, but thought I'd mix it up.
The sun is at least downhill. And you don't even have to hit the target: anything inside Mercury's orbit is likely going to need factor 5000000 sun cream.
Actually it's very much uphill from our frame of reference..
It would take less than half the energy required to reach the sun from earth, for a launch from earth to leave the solar system completely.
Couldn't understand your post, till I read that and realised that you're at the Earth's orbital speed when you launch, pretty much, and need to - effectively use retrorockets or gravitational braking around a planet to kill most of that speed to drop into a much lower orbit.
Orbital mechanics are counterintuitive, as our perceptions are based around standing still, while from the POV of the rest of the universe, the earth's surface is anything but that.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
I don't have cruise control and I don't have a max speed limiter. I have zero problems driving in places like Edinburgh where the limit is 20mph on almost all roads, and can still look where I'm going.
Am I some kind of driving savant? I don't think I am. Why are people pretending it's difficult?
It depends on the car. Many cars are designed to work better at certain speeds than others.
My car if I'm at 20 then I need to be in third gear to maintain that and in third gear minor changes in foot pressure (or slope of the ground) can lead to accelerating or decelerating.
If I'm at 30 then I can cruise (with or without cruise control) in fifth gear and minor slope/pressure changes don't result in sudden speed changes. Indeed if exiting a 30 and going to National Speed Limit then may need to drop down from fifth to fourth in order to rapidly accelerate.
Bigger issue is the fuel efficiency. Cruising at 30 in fifth is far more fuel efficient than at 20 in third, in my vehicle at least.
EVs will sort that.
Agreed, many of those issues are legacy issues, but they're real legacy issues for today.
And if you care about the environment for example then EV at 20 or EV at 30 is clean either way. But petrol at 20 can be less clean than petrol at 30.
Of course that's for cruising. Rapid and repeated acceleration/deceleration or stopping and starting is far worse than which speed you are doing.
Any Council that thinks its a good idea to put a red light on a roundabout, except major ones like motorway junctions, needs to be sent on a one way rocket to Mars.
Uh, how fuel efficient is the Martian rocket idea?
Well I planned for it being one way, so cuts off half the fuel you'd need for a round trip.
Other destinations are available. I was going to say the sun originally, but thought I'd mix it up.
The sun is at least downhill. And you don't even have to hit the target: anything inside Mercury's orbit is likely going to need factor 5000000 sun cream.
Unless you go in winter?
well then you just launch from Australia, where it's summer
And then you have the problem of launching while upside down
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
Uncanny has been something bright in the darkness of recent years. There is something great about the fact that the Uncanny community encompasses both sceptics and believers but manages to be amicable and just discuss the cases for what they are.
I belong firmly in the sceptic (in the sense that I don't believe in ghosts, I don't think UFO's or UAP;s are alien spacecraft or from an alternate reality etc). I do accept that people do see and experience things that they cannot explain.
A few years ago my wife and I were convinced we were seeing an ABC (anomalous big cat/alien black cat etc) in the field next to our house. It was black, feline and looked far bigger than a domestic cat. In the end the wife wandered closer, and then came back saying 'its just a black cat'. Distance misperception etc had led it to seem bigger than it really was. Yet if it had scarpered before we checked, we might to this day be regaling tales of our encounter.
Similarly one night, while travelling home from Bath (but in two cars) my Australian aunt say a ghost of a little old lady cross the road (at a place called Dead Maids. I saw a barn owl fly across. I 'think' she saw the owl and her mind turned it into a ghost, as she is a strong believer, but I cannot know for sure.
Ultimately society would be a lot nicer if it was a bit more like the uncanny community (or even, usually, PB).
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
exactly, usual ill thought out garbage policy using extremely dodgy statistics that are the opposite of reality.
The claim that a car travelling more slowly is more likely to be involved in an accident or produces 50% more pollution are the ill thought out and dodgy claims here. I'm surprised to see them on a site supposedly populated by intelligent and numerate people.
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free...
Not really.
The marginal cost of an additional kWh is close to free, but maintenance and replacement costs have to be factored in over the turbine life.
Offshore in particular has significant ongoing maintenance and replacement costs - wind turbines don't last anywhere near as long as tidal. At least 1p per kWh, I think ?
Tidal systems have, to date, either been extremely expensive (massively built) or not lasted very long.
The problem is that unless designed carefully, the excess energy in a storm does a nice job of tearing your tidal system to bits.
Two good answers - put the tide turbines below wave action, in a deep channel. The other, in tidal pond schemes, is to shield the turbines with the body of the pond. Neither has been implemented at scale, yet, though.
And don't take too much energy out the system or we will become tidally locked to the moon (or not, depending on the maths).
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
Maybe. Sunak started out unusually badly but perhaps that means he is not fundamentally popular and can fall lower than other leaders. Truss was kicked out so quickly I suspect her final net favourability rating of -51 flatters her significantly. John Major, who was widely liked initially and won an election, ended up around - 60 at his trough. For the last four months Sunak has lost about 5-6 points of net favourability each month, if that drop doesn't level off then he will be at -55 in just two months. I doubt it will happen that quickly but I think it entirely possible that Sunak plumbs those depths.
Yep. Truss's unpopularity, which she was prepared for (though of course not the extent) was a price of the policies she believed would bring economic growth. There's no pot of gold at the end of Sunak's rainbow, just more stagnation and falling living standards.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
Labour need to win at least two really to back up that sort of polling position - one won't cut it.
They are very heavy favourites in Rutherglen. Anything other than a win would be very poor for Labour and strongly suggest that they aren't going to make appreciable progress in Scotland. It would be up near the top of their list of targets to win from the SNP even without a by-election, and the circumstances of the by-election are bad for the SNP, so it'd be really bad for Labour not to win. It's a different problem for them than Tories doing well... but it's hard to get a majority if they are treading water in Scotland.
If Labour do get Rutherglen, but fail to get either of the others, you do have to colour me very sceptical that polls like the Deltapoll are at all realistic. Like Rutherglen, both are by-elections brought about in very unfavourable circumstances for the incumbent (by which I mean caused by disgrace rather than death). Neither are shoo-ins - big majority in Tamworth, Lib Dems fighting hard in Mid Beds. But getting neither really wouldn't be okay for Labour.
I'm not saying holding off Labour twice would mean Sunak can start making firm plans for his second term and Starmer may as well give up... just that it'd all suddenly look a lot more nip and tuck than these 20%+ lead polls would suggest.
I would agree that Lab need to win two. If they win Rutherglen then one of the others would do. If they don't win Rutherglen they they need to be doing better in England and taking both. Of course Lab don't need a 20% lead to win an election and even level polls would not get Mr Sunak home. However, to maintain their political momentum Lab really need to win two. If they win all three then its 1997 all over again. I'd predict Rutherglen and Tamworth to go Lab. Mid Beds is less clear but those seat polls and the clear willingness of oppo votes to be tactical mean the Cons could be in trouble there too.
If you say the population of Wales is 4.5% of the UK, then a straight line pro rata gives 1,260 to 1,620 Welsh deaths due to poor quality air each year.
So to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths from RTA's from 10, the Welsh Government is risking perhaps hundreds more deaths annually from increased air pollution caused by journeys that take 50% longer and make air quality poorer for 50% longer.
It is also worth pointing out that as every journey takes 50% longer*, the risk of a vehicle being in a collision rises too. The chance of a child running out into a car rises by 50%. Yes, the child might not be so badly injured, but it is still a significantly enhanced risk.
* This is of course slightly less than 50% longer, because of the time taken for the vehicle to get from 20 mph to 30 mph. But the bigger point is still valid.
Don't forget ULEZ, like 20mph is also very bad communism, both detested by honest yeoman Tories since day one.
Yet bot policies where the Tory party party kicked off the idea and than ran away denying all knowledge about them even though their name is all over the paperwork.
Wind and gas generation are just financially completely different, as others have explained.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free...
Not really.
The marginal cost of an additional kWh is close to free, but maintenance and replacement costs have to be factored in over the turbine life.
Offshore in particular has significant ongoing maintenance and replacement costs - wind turbines don't last anywhere near as long as tidal. At least 1p per kWh, I think ?
Tidal systems have, to date, either been extremely expensive (massively built) or not lasted very long.
The problem is that unless designed carefully, the excess energy in a storm does a nice job of tearing your tidal system to bits.
Two good answers - put the tide turbines below wave action, in a deep channel. The other, in tidal pond schemes, is to shield the turbines with the body of the pond. Neither has been implemented at scale, yet, though.
And don't take too much energy out the system or we will become tidally locked to the moon (or not, depending on the maths).
Month long days would be interesting.
I suppose things wouldn't be much different at the North Pole...but it might get a bit hot elsewhere.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
He noting merely that the last auction failed, and building an argument on that.
Which ignores the fact that UK maximum strike price for the auctions has been steadily dropping - but government failed to allow for the last year's spike in construction and financing costs.
Wind is still cheap, and likely to get cheaper as the technology develops, but there's been a short term uptick in development costs.
It will never compete on price with (eg) Saudi solar power, of course.
I think you and TimS are being a little evasive - Barty is claiming (it would appear on the basis of the No. 1 Google search result) that wind is cheaper than gas - that is absolutely 100% untrue over the long term, yet you both seem to want to foster this delusion.
Barty is getting his info from Carbon Brief - this piece fact checks them:
"One therm equals 29.3071 KWh, so the January gas price of around 150p/therm equates to about £51/MWh, which is substantially less than the price of electricity. Since then gas prices have dropped further to 120 pence.
Evans claims that energy bills are high because of the price of gas, but clearly they would be much higher if we all had to use electricity instead.
TRICK 2
But the real dishonesty is his failure to mention that offshore and even onshore wind power is considerably more expensive than gas-fired power, despite the currently high price of gas.
Market prices of electricity averaged £121/MWh, and this price usually reflects the price of gas-fired power. However offshore wind farms subsidised under CfDs were paid an average of £167/MWh.
And offshore wind subsidised via ROCs, which account for about half of the offshore sector, earn £100/MWh on top of the market price, a total of £221/MWh.
The weighted average cost for all offshore farms was therefore £194/MWh.
Even onshore wind farms receive a subsidy of £52/MWh on top of the market price.
And these costs don’t even include the extra costs incurred by the grid associated with intermittent wind power.
In other words, even in the midst of a global gas crisis, gas generation is still cheaper than wind by orders of magnitude. At normal gas prices, there isn't even a comparison.
@BartholomewRoberts - the linked piece might add some context to my comments. If I believed as you do that wind was actually cheaper than gas, of course I'd feel the same way you do about it and argue vociferously for its merits. However, it isn't.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
Labour need to win at least two really to back up that sort of polling position - one won't cut it.
They are very heavy favourites in Rutherglen. Anything other than a win would be very poor for Labour and strongly suggest that they aren't going to make appreciable progress in Scotland. It would be up near the top of their list of targets to win from the SNP even without a by-election, and the circumstances of the by-election are bad for the SNP, so it'd be really bad for Labour not to win. It's a different problem for them than Tories doing well... but it's hard to get a majority if they are treading water in Scotland.
If Labour do get Rutherglen, but fail to get either of the others, you do have to colour me very sceptical that polls like the Deltapoll are at all realistic. Like Rutherglen, both are by-elections brought about in very unfavourable circumstances for the incumbent (by which I mean caused by disgrace rather than death). Neither are shoo-ins - big majority in Tamworth, Lib Dems fighting hard in Mid Beds. But getting neither really wouldn't be okay for Labour.
I'm not saying holding off Labour twice would mean Sunak can start making firm plans for his second term and Starmer may as well give up... just that it'd all suddenly look a lot more nip and tuck than these 20%+ lead polls would suggest.
I would agree that Lab need to win two. If they win Rutherglen then one of the others would do. If they don't win Rutherglen they they need to be doing better in England and taking both. Of course Lab don't need a 20% lead to win an election and even level polls would not get Mr Sunak home. However, to maintain their political momentum Lab really need to win two. If they win all three then its 1997 all over again. I'd predict Rutherglen and Tamworth to go Lab. Mid Beds is less clear but those seat polls and the clear willingness of oppo votes to be tactical mean the Cons could be in trouble there too.
We shouldn't overly-focus on the win/loss. How much Labour wins or loses by is more important than the binary, even though it'll be the latter which the media will fixate on.
500-vote losses in both Tamworth and Mid Beds would still be very good results for Labour (perhaps more so than 500-vote wins, as it'd encourage complacency within the Tories. Similarly, a 500-vote win in Rutherglen would be a very poor result in the circumstances, barely better than losing; they should be racking up a majority there well into the thousands.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
Its not a car phone, I just left my mobile on the passenger seat. It was during the day so not scary just completely bizarre. He was not the last number I called, there were 9 other calls made between me calling him and the phone calling him twice by itself. If my phone had called him when I was at home it would not have felt so weird and I would probably just have shrugged. It was the fact I was sat next to him in his lounge on his sofa when it called him twice.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
Its not a car phone, I just left my mobile on the passenger seat. It was during the day so not scary just completely bizarre. He was not the last number I called, there were 9 other calls made between me calling him and the phone calling him twice by itself. If my phone had called him when I was at home it would not have felt so weird and I would probably just have shrugged. It was the fact I was sat next to him in his lounge on his sofa when it called him twice.
I can see how that would be unnerving. I don't ascribe it to anything other than some technology glitch.
Malmesbury said: "If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
Malmesbury said: "If you were *cycling* at 99.999999% of the speed of light, you would release 22 million megatons of energy on impact. Which would probably destroy the planet fairly effectively.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Everyone should read this thread, https://twitter.com/LukeTryl/status/1684118582924279808 , to understand why the Right are completely wrong if they think opposing messages to limit climate change is going to win them Red Wall votes.
What chance that central government ends up running more of local government than councillors within the next five years?
It has been inevitable, at least since covid, that it would play out this way given how local government finance is. The government have been hiring these commissioners at the rate of something like £1200 per day.
She's right. I remember being slightly bemused by many of the Guardian BTL comments at the time: basically Brand was the wronged hero and Andrew Sachs deserved all he got by being a racist who peddled xenophobic anti-Spanish stereotypes. (The unfortunate Georgina, as Marina says, was barely considered.)
Marina Hyde considered her enough to label her a "Satanic Slut" in the Guardian.
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
Its not a car phone, I just left my mobile on the passenger seat. It was during the day so not scary just completely bizarre. He was not the last number I called, there were 9 other calls made between me calling him and the phone calling him twice by itself. If my phone had called him when I was at home it would not have felt so weird and I would probably just have shrugged. It was the fact I was sat next to him in his lounge on his sofa when it called him twice.
I can see how that would be unnerving. I don't ascribe it to anything other than some technology glitch.
But...
...
We will never know!!!
Absolutely, I remember me asking him who his calling, and the look on his face when he said "You Are"
My phone is 2 years old, it behaves entirely normally, and as mentioned has never done this before or since.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
I don't know where you're getting your data from but as far as I'm aware that's completely fallacious. Wind power is a fraction of the cost of gas as far as I can recall.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
He noting merely that the last auction failed, and building an argument on that.
Which ignores the fact that UK maximum strike price for the auctions has been steadily dropping - but government failed to allow for the last year's spike in construction and financing costs.
Wind is still cheap, and likely to get cheaper as the technology develops, but there's been a short term uptick in development costs.
It will never compete on price with (eg) Saudi solar power, of course.
I think you and TimS are being a little evasive - Barty is claiming (it would appear on the basis of the No. 1 Google search result) that wind is cheaper than gas - that is absolutely 100% untrue over the long term, yet you both seem to want to foster this delusion.
Barty is getting his info from Carbon Brief - this piece fact checks them:
"One therm equals 29.3071 KWh, so the January gas price of around 150p/therm equates to about £51/MWh, which is substantially less than the price of electricity. Since then gas prices have dropped further to 120 pence.
Evans claims that energy bills are high because of the price of gas, but clearly they would be much higher if we all had to use electricity instead.
TRICK 2
But the real dishonesty is his failure to mention that offshore and even onshore wind power is considerably more expensive than gas-fired power, despite the currently high price of gas.
Market prices of electricity averaged £121/MWh, and this price usually reflects the price of gas-fired power. However offshore wind farms subsidised under CfDs were paid an average of £167/MWh.
And offshore wind subsidised via ROCs, which account for about half of the offshore sector, earn £100/MWh on top of the market price, a total of £221/MWh.
The weighted average cost for all offshore farms was therefore £194/MWh.
Even onshore wind farms receive a subsidy of £52/MWh on top of the market price.
And these costs don’t even include the extra costs incurred by the grid associated with intermittent wind power.
In other words, even in the midst of a global gas crisis, gas generation is still cheaper than wind by orders of magnitude. At normal gas prices, there isn't even a comparison.
Ok a couple of mistakes you are making here which compound your misunderstanding.
Yes one therm equals that, that's correct, but a kWh of electricity fed from gas costs more than the raw cost of gas itself. It costs for the infrastructure of the gas plant, the staff, the profits and so on. Price wise using gas as electricity is less efficient than using gas as gas.
That article is comparing using gas as gas, versus using electricity, NOT the cost of gas-fuelled electricity.
Second mistake you are making is that the average of existing offshore wind is used as the price of new and future wind which is completely fallacious. Yes the first windfarms while the technology was nascent had high contracts for differences, which was designed to encourage the technology to be developed. New developments are ineligible to get old contracts though, so that's moot.
The correct claim that new wind developments were cheaper than gas was by looking at new contracts that are being agreed, not old outdated ones.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
Maybe. Sunak started out unusually badly but perhaps that means he is not fundamentally popular and can fall lower than other leaders. Truss was kicked out so quickly I suspect her final net favourability rating of -51 flatters her significantly. John Major, who was widely liked initially and won an election, ended up around - 60 at his trough. For the last four months Sunak has lost about 5-6 points of net favourability each month, if that drop doesn't level off then he will be at -55 in just two months. I doubt it will happen that quickly but I think it entirely possible that Sunak plumbs those depths.
Yep. Truss's unpopularity, which she was prepared for (though of course not the extent) was a price of the policies she believed would bring economic growth. There's no pot of gold at the end of Sunak's rainbow, just more stagnation and falling living standards.
Well I think we can all agree on that. Sunak offers nothing of any interest other than dullness, which to be fair has its own value after years of UK politics being a bit too newsworthy but isn't really much of a policy position.
Where most disagree is that Trussonomics is the answer in a country which is so clearly and visibly crumbling through lack of infrastructure investment. As to what the answer is, I really don't know.
She's right. I remember being slightly bemused by many of the Guardian BTL comments at the time: basically Brand was the wronged hero and Andrew Sachs deserved all he got by being a racist who peddled xenophobic anti-Spanish stereotypes. (The unfortunate Georgina, as Marina says, was barely considered.)
Marina Hyde considered her enough to label her a "Satanic Slut" in the Guardian.
"Baillie has worked in burlesque, some of her collaborators and projects include: Salvation Group, and Satanic Sluts Extreme, a four piece "gothic burlesque" dance group originating as an offshoot of the online subculture "Satanic sluts" organised by Nigel Wingrove; her persona's stage name was Voluptua. Self-described as: "four of the sexiest depraved London jezebels", they performed at Glastonbury music festival and in several music videos."
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
We also need him to explain how Ukraine invaded Russia...
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
Its not a car phone, I just left my mobile on the passenger seat. It was during the day so not scary just completely bizarre. He was not the last number I called, there were 9 other calls made between me calling him and the phone calling him twice by itself. If my phone had called him when I was at home it would not have felt so weird and I would probably just have shrugged. It was the fact I was sat next to him in his lounge on his sofa when it called him twice.
I can see how that would be unnerving. I don't ascribe it to anything other than some technology glitch.
But...
...
We will never know!!!
That’s most likely to be related to a glitch in an always-listening assistant thingy (Hey Siri, Hey Google), posssibly initiated inadvertently by the friend, and combined with car and phone settings to initiate a call back to an unanswered call. A seemingly impossible series of events, but with a rational explanation that’s possibly replicable.
(Sorry but I do IT forensics and investigations at work, and computers just do weird sh!t sometimes)
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Everyone should read this thread, https://twitter.com/LukeTryl/status/1684118582924279808 , to understand why the Right are completely wrong if they think opposing messages to limit climate change is going to win them Red Wall votes.
'Measures to limit climate change' in the abstract are offensive to absolutely nobody. Profound undermining of standards of living and limits on accepted freedoms (like having a car) in order to make an incredibly marginal difference to world carbon emissions, deserve far greater scrutiny, and I suspect are a much tougher sell to red-wallers.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
- The joyous thing is that the modern Labour Party isn't just signed up to Net Zero, they're signed up to Ulez, LTNs and 20mph, destroying our home-grown energy industry, and a host of the most unpopular and anti-working class policies that could be imagined. And they think they'll be in power longer than New Labour?
Tell that to everyone employed in offshore wind in Teesside. Embrace the future.
With all due respect to the hard-working dead bird collectors of Teeside, Wind still requires gas back up. So we still need gas, and we should get our own gas out, for both financial and environmental reasons.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Wind only needs gas backup today as its not scaled up yet.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
It's been explained here that wind, especially offshore, isn't economical and never will be. It's permanently expensive power. Recent auctions offering a strike price of over twice the usual rate of gas (afaicr) failed due to lack of interest. I support the effort to even out wind supply by upgrading the grid, incentivising storage etc., because we have so much of it, and we need to make the best of it. But I'm sorry to say I think it's totally the wrong renewable for the UK, and has become a feeding frenzy for subsidy sponging overseas firms.
This isn't a blip. Look at the underlying numbers in both the Deltapoll and Ipsos polls today (helpfully summarised in the threads below). They're awful for the Tories.
In my piece over the weekend I said that I expected Starmer's relative net favourability advantage to increase from 15 to 35 as I expected Starmer to remain moderately unpopular and Sunak to become more unpopular as his honeymoon ended and the government's troubles mounted. In this month's survey this process seems well in train with Starmer's advantage increasing to 23 points (40% of the increase I expected to see before the election) as Sunak's net favourability declined and Starmer remains approximately level.
I think a 35 point gap might be over-doing it. It's very rare for a politician to have net ratings much worse than -50, which is pretty close to where Sunak is now. Without blowing up the government, like Truss did, I don't think it'll get that much worse for him; he's near core support now.
But core support used to be about 30%, David. It's now 25%.
What price 20%?
It has been known for a governing party to be on 20% in the polls, but win a huge majority at the next GE… happened all of four years ago
The book "Into the Uncanny" by Danny Robins has just come out, (the chap who does the ghost podcasts)
Its a fantastic and startling read.
It is fantastic and startling because of peoples' ability to create phenomena which are not objectively real.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I am definitely on the believer side, I have been witness to some very strange things, as I mentioned last month, my mobile called my friend from my car whilst I was sitting next to him on his sofa in his lounge. He answered, there was no one there. Two minutes later my phone called him back. We went straight out to my car and on the front seat of my locked car was my phone calling my friend. My phone has not done this before or since. My friend will never forget this happening.
I think we need Dura to explain the strange behaviours of car-based phone technology.
Its not a car phone, I just left my mobile on the passenger seat. It was during the day so not scary just completely bizarre. He was not the last number I called, there were 9 other calls made between me calling him and the phone calling him twice by itself. If my phone had called him when I was at home it would not have felt so weird and I would probably just have shrugged. It was the fact I was sat next to him in his lounge on his sofa when it called him twice.
I can see how that would be unnerving. I don't ascribe it to anything other than some technology glitch.
But...
...
We will never know!!!
That’s most likely to be related to a glitch in an always-listening assistant thingy (Hey Siri, Hey Google), posssibly initiated inadvertently by the friend, and combined with car and phone settings to initiate a call back to an unanswered call. A seemingly impossible series of events, but with a rational explanation that’s possibly replicable.
(Sorry but I do IT forensics and investigations at work, and computers just do weird sh!t sometimes)
I have a 20 year old Ford Focus, my phone is a basic Samsung, we were in his lounge, 30 metres from where my car was parked. I have tried to re-enact the situation to get it to do it again, but in reality it was just on the front seat of my car.
It was also the fact that it waited 2 minutes before calling him back.
And just as you start to despair of Labour having any ambition at all they confirm they'll build the whole of HS2 and NPR (though I'll believe it when I see it).
I know "out of touch" is a cliche but the government really are coming across as very 1996/7 at the moment. Tired and out of ideas.
Their big opportunity in the near term is a poor Labour showing at the byelections. If the SNP keep Rutherglen and Tories retain Tamworth (quite possible) and Mid Beds (also quite possible) then we'll get a couple of weeks of Starmer in crisis to reset the media narrative. If Labour win 2 or 3 of those then it'll just pile on the pain. If Labour win Rutherglen and Tamworth and Lib Dems get Mid Beds with Labour second then the Tories will go into meltdown.
She's right. I remember being slightly bemused by many of the Guardian BTL comments at the time: basically Brand was the wronged hero and Andrew Sachs deserved all he got by being a racist who peddled xenophobic anti-Spanish stereotypes. (The unfortunate Georgina, as Marina says, was barely considered.)
Marina Hyde considered her enough to label her a "Satanic Slut" in the Guardian.
Comments
Net zero - if you mean don't fly, don't drive etc that's just stupid and will never work. If you mean invest in clean cars, clean electricity, clean flights etc that does work.
LTNs - if you mean just stick up barriers on existing through routes without any alternatives, that doesn't work. If you mean build new roads as through routes and leave roads to be residential LTN roads that's entirely reasonable.
20mph - if you mean just make the limit 20mph and leave it at that, that's stupid. If you mean invest in faster 40-70mph through roads and leave LTN side streets as 20mph, that's entirely reasonable.
The problem isn't any of those as an ambition. The problem is hypocrites who want to do it cheaply, without the necessary investment to make it work.
Invest in clean technologies, invest in more roads, invest in solutions, then you can have those desired outcomes. Don't do so, there's no free lunches.
I am in favour of renewable energy btw, but I prefer reliable sources like tidal.
Invest in clean technologies and you can have net zero.
Invest in new roads and you can have LTNs and 20mph side streets.
Investment is necessary.
For a car making a specific journey and a pedestrian making a journey crossing the car's path the speed at which the car is travelling is irrelevant to the probability of the vehicle and pedestrian's path crossing. What determines the likelihood of an accident is the ability of both to take corrective action to avoid the collision. This is unambiguously decreasing in the speed of the vehicle.
Wind + batteries in the future won't.
And the best batteries of all? Cars.
Wind powered cars are the future. And wind is a lot cheaper than petrol.
And my trusty BMW takes me there and back.
https://twitter.com/DeltapollUK/status/1704101157084205070
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1704093526869311566
And do remember that tidal produces different amounts according to where you are in the tidal cycle. So, when the tide is turning (which will be at roughly the same time for the whole country), it won't be generating at all.
The state putting a thumb on the scale when it comes to externalities is quite reasonable, that's not the state "picking winners", its taxing the externality which means the market prices the externality.
Zealots who want people other than them never to fly, that's never going to happen. Where the state can play a sensible role is in encouraging clean technologies to be developed, by either funding science and technology or creating incentives to allow the space for the better technologies to be developed. That's entirely in fitting with liberal thinking.
For aviation for instance, our current taxation is completely absurd. A flight flying transatlantic 100 passengers while emitting 100 tonnes of CO2 will pay half the tax of a flight flying transatlantic 200 passengers which emits 50 tonnes of CO2. That makes no sense. The latter has 1/4 the emissions per passenger than the former, yet passengers on both have the same tax payable, the latter should should have their taxes cut.
Cape Wrath 10:42
Hull 09:13
Dover 14:03
Penzance 07:42
Liverpool 14:11
It's also a lot easier to timeshift energy for a couple of hours - to cover the slack periods in a tidal cycle - then it is to store energy for weeks for a once-in-a-decade prolonged period of high pressure at the winter solstice.
Wind is great, but wind and tidal is better.
The recent auction failed because the market is going through some disruption at the moment, prior auctions have not. That's not unreasonable.
See this: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-low-price-for-uk-offshore-wind-is-four-times-cheaper-than-gas/
A UK government auction has secured a record 11 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity that will generate electricity nine times more cheaply than current gas prices.
While the government has continued to try and push down the auction price steel and other costs have transpired to make the current office price insufficient to cover the costs and risks involved.
With interest rates going up a lot recently this makes wind a lot more expensive in a finance sense, even were the cost of construction unchanged.
This is less of a problem for a gas plant where most of the cost overall is in posting for the fuel, and so you don't need to carry so much debt to finance it.
Wind costs a lot to construct then is virtually free. Gas costs little to construct but the fuel costs money. It’s like lease or buy. Cheaper overall to buy your new car outright, but easier up-front to lease it.
Tidal of course is an extreme example of this. Horrendous cost to construct but nearly free once done, excepting maintenance.
But lucky guy has his beliefs. I’d say arguably the most unshakeably ideological member on PB, excepting perhaps BJO (whose ideology is mainly hating Starmer).
EDIT: how could I forget HYUFD? The gold medalist.
So you would kill 6 billion people.
It would take less than half the energy required to reach the sun from earth, for a launch from earth to leave the solar system completely.
The Parker Solar Probe required an unprecedented effort:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576520306512
I did not mention this to the officers.
Which ignores the fact that UK maximum strike price for the auctions has been steadily dropping - but government failed to allow for the last year's spike in construction and financing costs.
Wind is still cheap, and likely to get cheaper as the technology develops, but there's been a short term uptick in development costs.
It will never compete on price with (eg) Saudi solar power, of course.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2023/sep/19/starmer-macron-paris-labour-brexit-renegotiation-rishi-sunak-uk-politics-latest
What price 20%?
The marginal cost of an additional kWh is close to free, but maintenance and replacement costs have to be factored in over the turbine life.
Offshore in particular has significant ongoing maintenance and replacement costs - wind turbines don't last anywhere near as long as tidal.
At least 1p per kWh, I think ?
The area at risk will be everywhere within the stopping distance of the car.
A simple sum then:
1mile at 30mph. Time = 120sec. Stopping distance = 23m (officially).
1mile at 20mph. Time = 180sec. Stopping distance = 12m (officially).
Area at risk for a car 1.8m wide:
30mph -> 120 x 23 x 1.8 = 4968sm^2
20mph -> 180 x 12 x 1.8 = 3888sm^2
Of course, you might want to segregate that into 'serious risk' which could be defined as the area that might get hit at more than 20mph. Which would make the results rather different...
The real question is, NICE style - what life is gained by the driver giving up a minute?
Plus, timings. A leadership election takes a minimum of about 4 weeks but realistically at least 6. That either takes out a whole load of parliamentary time navel-gazing when they should be governing, or is done over the summer recess, which would then give the new leader very little time to prepare for the general election campaign - and the Party no time to recover if it gets it wrong.
The problem is that unless designed carefully, the excess energy in a storm does a nice job of tearing your tidal system to bits.
Two good answers - put the tide turbines below wave action, in a deep channel. The other, in tidal pond schemes, is to shield the turbines with the body of the pond. Neither has been implemented at scale, yet, though.
Its a fantastic and startling read.
Barty is getting his info from Carbon Brief - this piece fact checks them:
"One therm equals 29.3071 KWh, so the January gas price of around 150p/therm equates to about £51/MWh, which is substantially less than the price of electricity. Since then gas prices have dropped further to 120 pence.
Evans claims that energy bills are high because of the price of gas, but clearly they would be much higher if we all had to use electricity instead.
TRICK 2
But the real dishonesty is his failure to mention that offshore and even onshore wind power is considerably more expensive than gas-fired power, despite the currently high price of gas.
Market prices of electricity averaged £121/MWh, and this price usually reflects the price of gas-fired power. However offshore wind farms subsidised under CfDs were paid an average of £167/MWh.
And offshore wind subsidised via ROCs, which account for about half of the offshore sector, earn £100/MWh on top of the market price, a total of £221/MWh.
The weighted average cost for all offshore farms was therefore £194/MWh.
Even onshore wind farms receive a subsidy of £52/MWh on top of the market price.
And these costs don’t even include the extra costs incurred by the grid associated with intermittent wind power.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/gas-power-is-cheaper-than-wind-despite-carbon-briefs-claims/
In other words, even in the midst of a global gas crisis, gas generation is still cheaper than wind by orders of magnitude. At normal gas prices, there isn't even a comparison.
They are very heavy favourites in Rutherglen. Anything other than a win would be very poor for Labour and strongly suggest that they aren't going to make appreciable progress in Scotland. It would be up near the top of their list of targets to win from the SNP even without a by-election, and the circumstances of the by-election are bad for the SNP, so it'd be really bad for Labour not to win. It's a different problem for them than Tories doing well... but it's hard to get a majority if they are treading water in Scotland.
If Labour do get Rutherglen, but fail to get either of the others, you do have to colour me very sceptical that polls like the Deltapoll are at all realistic. Like Rutherglen, both are by-elections brought about in very unfavourable circumstances for the incumbent (by which I mean caused by disgrace rather than death). Neither are shoo-ins - big majority in Tamworth, Lib Dems fighting hard in Mid Beds. But getting neither really wouldn't be okay for Labour.
I'm not saying holding off Labour twice would mean Sunak can start making firm plans for his second term and Starmer may as well give up... just that it'd all suddenly look a lot more nip and tuck than these 20%+ lead polls would suggest.
I enjoy listening to the podcasts but some are more ridiculous than others (the guys camping in the French countryside hearing "footsteps of an animal") while the rest are of course just directions of the mind .
Plus why do poltergeists never actually manage to do any damage to humans.
And no I don't intend to spend the next hour reiterating that ghosts (and gods) don't exist.
They don't so back to the physics of Boris bikes.
I belong firmly in the sceptic (in the sense that I don't believe in ghosts, I don't think UFO's or UAP;s are alien spacecraft or from an alternate reality etc). I do accept that people do see and experience things that they cannot explain.
A few years ago my wife and I were convinced we were seeing an ABC (anomalous big cat/alien black cat etc) in the field next to our house. It was black, feline and looked far bigger than a domestic cat. In the end the wife wandered closer, and then came back saying 'its just a black cat'. Distance misperception etc had led it to seem bigger than it really was. Yet if it had scarpered before we checked, we might to this day be regaling tales of our encounter.
Similarly one night, while travelling home from Bath (but in two cars) my Australian aunt say a ghost of a little old lady cross the road (at a place called Dead Maids. I saw a barn owl fly across. I 'think' she saw the owl and her mind turned it into a ghost, as she is a strong believer, but I cannot know for sure.
Ultimately society would be a lot nicer if it was a bit more like the uncanny community (or even, usually, PB).
I suppose things wouldn't be much different at the North Pole...but it might get a bit hot elsewhere.
500-vote losses in both Tamworth and Mid Beds would still be very good results for Labour (perhaps more so than 500-vote wins, as it'd encourage complacency within the Tories. Similarly, a 500-vote win in Rutherglen would be a very poor result in the circumstances, barely better than losing; they should be racking up a majority there well into the thousands.
But...
...
We will never know!!!
So you would kill 6 billion people."
And the remaining 2 billion (approximately) won't be in great shape.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2009/jan/26/celebrity
My phone is 2 years old, it behaves entirely normally, and as mentioned has never done this before or since.
Yes one therm equals that, that's correct, but a kWh of electricity fed from gas costs more than the raw cost of gas itself. It costs for the infrastructure of the gas plant, the staff, the profits and so on. Price wise using gas as electricity is less efficient than using gas as gas.
That article is comparing using gas as gas, versus using electricity, NOT the cost of gas-fuelled electricity.
Second mistake you are making is that the average of existing offshore wind is used as the price of new and future wind which is completely fallacious. Yes the first windfarms while the technology was nascent had high contracts for differences, which was designed to encourage the technology to be developed. New developments are ineligible to get old contracts though, so that's moot.
The correct claim that new wind developments were cheaper than gas was by looking at new contracts that are being agreed, not old outdated ones.
Where most disagree is that Trussonomics is the answer in a country which is so clearly and visibly crumbling through lack of infrastructure investment. As to what the answer is, I really don't know.
There was a downbeat piece in today's CityAM on this: https://www.cityam.com/weve-maxed-out-our-credit-card-of-taxes-but-we-still-need-more-cash/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgina_Baillie
"Baillie has worked in burlesque, some of her collaborators and projects include: Salvation Group, and Satanic Sluts Extreme, a four piece "gothic burlesque" dance group originating as an offshoot of the online subculture "Satanic sluts" organised by Nigel Wingrove; her persona's stage name was Voluptua. Self-described as: "four of the sexiest depraved London jezebels", they performed at Glastonbury music festival and in several music videos."
(Sorry but I do IT forensics and investigations at work, and computers just do weird sh!t sometimes)
at the next GE… happened all of four years ago
No chance this time though
I have tried to re-enact the situation to get it to do it again, but in reality it was just on the front seat of my car.
It was also the fact that it waited 2 minutes before calling him back.
Polling is down. Sunak's ratings are also way down. And some ministers and backbenchers have been saying some very silly things.
Gillian Keegan today saying school children are happier in portakabins (she's probably right, it's like camping, but don't say that out loud for heaven's sake) https://x.com/LizzyBuchan/status/1704110861885833611?s=20
They're trying hard to reignite culture wars on immigration and Brexit but just looking silly https://x.com/BenHouchen/status/1704150151235875093?s=20
https://x.com/georgeeaton/status/1704150899961024527?s=20
And just as you start to despair of Labour having any ambition at all they confirm they'll build the whole of HS2 and NPR (though I'll believe it when I see it).
I know "out of touch" is a cliche but the government really are coming across as very 1996/7 at the moment. Tired and out of ideas.
Their big opportunity in the near term is a poor Labour showing at the byelections. If the SNP keep Rutherglen and Tories retain Tamworth (quite possible) and Mid Beds (also quite possible) then we'll get a couple of weeks of Starmer in crisis to reset the media narrative. If Labour win 2 or 3 of those then it'll just pile on the pain. If Labour win Rutherglen and Tamworth and Lib Dems get Mid Beds with Labour second then the Tories will go into meltdown.