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)
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 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.
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.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
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.
Hyde is referencing Baillie's "Satanic Sluts Extreme" burlesque dance group. It's her own label.
And she was being equally charming and non-victim blaming with this passage:
"Anyway, about halfway down Georgina manages to wrench the subject matter back to herself – she hasn't the most gossamer of authorial touches, bless her – as she drones:
"I then realised that although he had sent a letter of apology to my family, he never actually directly addressed me with an apology...."
Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go."
And in her article today she specifically castigates Brand for not having apologised to Baillie.
- 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.
Yes, polling on “Should we get to Net Zero by 2050” is overwhelmingly positive.
Polling on “But that means I need to spend two hours getting three buses to work, because my car is being taxed out of existence”, might yield a different result.
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)
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 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.
Really?
Gigawatts correctly pronounced as "jigger-watts" like Christopher Lloyd in "Back to the Future"?
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
- 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.
One area where gas proponents have a point is that the current costs of gas are not necessarily a good guide to the future. They are historically high. They will never be as low again as when we were pumping stuff through pipelines from Russia, but they will no doubt fall. Gas is a global commodity and it rises and falls. It is much preferable to coal and the right transition fuel, but Putin's behaviour and the fact we are now in the hands of the Qataris among others (and UK fracking is never going to fill that gap) has made it a less reliable friend than before.
- 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?
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.
Have you read the thread? Everyone, read the thread. It explains how catastrophic climate events are very scary to a proportion of voters; they cut through. And they particularly cut through with the sort of Red Wall voters that voted Tory in 2019.
- 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.
Really?
Gigawatts correctly pronounced as "jigger-watts" like Christopher Lloyd in "Back to the Future"?
Notable they deliberately exclude vegetable-fed fusion power in the levellised cost analysis.
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)
Yep. I have no doubt.
Does your friend work in a security sensitive position?
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy? So you're comparing historically high gas prices with fictional wind prices?
- 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.
Really?
Gigawatts correctly pronounced as "jigger-watts" like Christopher Lloyd in "Back to the Future"?
Notable they deliberately exclude vegetable-fed fusion power in the levellised cost analysis.
Had to reread that last bit three times.
Don't you mean fusion-fed vegetable power?
Veg-fed fusion is what you get in trendy eating places, no?
In today's Times, "three writers" anonymously admit to doing things like stealing small items from supermarkets, hotels and such-like, or putting a 90p breadroll from Waitrose through as a 50p roll. Middle-class thievery.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy?
New contracts have been signed for a few years now without subsidy.
There were no signatures this time, but given the turmoil in the market that's not that unusual.
Many systems operate with auctions with no bidders from time to time. That's why you have reserves, so if you don't get what you want it gets passed in and can be reauctioned again later on.
- 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.
Have you read the thread? Everyone, read the thread. It explains how catastrophic climate events are very scary to a proportion of voters; they cut through. And they particularly cut through with the sort of Red Wall voters that voted Tory in 2019.
Much as I look forward to Labour scaring everyone shitless about forest fires until they hand over their car keys whilst tugging their forelock, I'm uncertain of its merits as an electoral strategy. We'll have to see won't we?
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.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
- 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.
Have you read the thread? Everyone, read the thread. It explains how catastrophic climate events are very scary to a proportion of voters; they cut through. And they particularly cut through with the sort of Red Wall voters that voted Tory in 2019.
Much as I look forward to Labour scaring everyone shitless about forest fires until they hand over their car keys whilst tugging their forelock, I'm uncertain of its merits as an electoral strategy. We'll have to see won't we?
Current polling does not suggest that the Tories’ current backsliding on Net Zero is winning them support.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy? So you're comparing historically high gas prices with fictional wind prices?
The bidders have big spreadsheets that contain estimates of capital cost plus financing cost (these builds are heavily leveraged so the cost of debt has a big impact) on one side, and then the future strike price needed to be achieved to deliver a positive NPV at whatever the current cost of capital is.
What the auctions do is set the future price government will commit to pay for power. It's the same mechanism as used for Nuclear and other large scale capital projects including for example road building or rail franchises. Is that a subsidy? You could argue it is in the sense that government is stepping in to guarantee a return. The issue is that wind once constructed is very cheap, and plentiful at times electricity is cheap. So it drives down the electricity price. But that guaranteed strike price has been falling for years. The reason it's bumped up is that the capex cost has risen because of inflation and the funding cost has soared because of interest rates (at least in part because of Truss).
Again we are comparing apples with oranges. Gas has low initial capital outlay and an ongoing and volatile input cost, which is also non-renewable and is making the world hot. Nuclear, wind, tidal, solar etc have much greater capital outlay and then negligible input costs once built. It's classical rent vs buy stuff.
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.
To be fair, that was the name of the dance troupe for which the young lady in question worked.
The headline might be fair enough, but she’s pretty dismissive of her in the article
Oh indeed. Hyde really didn’t like the idea that a young lady thrust into being headline news for a week, against her will, might wish to try and make the most of her proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
Although at the same time a by-election doesn't really matter so people might (not) vote accordingly. A poll, meanwhile, forces people to think about a general election and removes the inertia from process.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
By-elections should be worse predictors than polling because they happen in a small number of places that can be geographically unrepresentative; under unusual circumstances (voters may be reacting to the particular issues that caused a by-election, like a scandal); with very different patterns of campaigning (smaller parties can flood the constituency with workers in a way they can’t at a general election); voters know that the result will not determine who is PM; and they typically have unusually low turnouts. We frequently see very large swings at by-elections that are not reflected at general elections. We frequently see by-elections wins revert to the previous party at a general election.
I’d love to see the maths for a comparison of by-election swings vs contemporary polling as predictors of general election results. I would be surprised if it doesn’t say polling is better.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
I'm shocked! Shocked to find that dodgy data are being posted here ...
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy? So you're comparing historically high gas prices with fictional wind prices?
The bidders have big spreadsheets that contain estimates of capital cost plus financing cost (these builds are heavily leveraged so the cost of debt has a big impact) on one side, and then the future strike price needed to be achieved to deliver a positive NPV at whatever the current cost of capital is.
What the auctions do is set the future price government will commit to pay for power. It's the same mechanism as used for Nuclear and other large scale capital projects including for example road building or rail franchises. Is that a subsidy? You could argue it is in the sense that government is stepping in to guarantee a return. The issue is that wind once constructed is very cheap, and plentiful at times electricity is cheap. So it drives down the electricity price. But that guaranteed strike price has been falling for years. The reason it's bumped up is that the capex cost has risen because of inflation and the funding cost has soared because of interest rates (at least in part because of Truss).
Again we are comparing apples with oranges. Gas has low initial capital outlay and an ongoing and volatile input cost, which is also non-renewable and is making the world hot. Nuclear, wind, tidal, solar etc have much greater capital outlay and then negligible input costs once built. It's classical rent vs buy stuff.
Exactly. And the maximum reserve for the strike price was well below the gas-based electricity market price.
Which makes perfect sense, because the strike price is going to be for years in the future so you want it to be good value. Just because this latest round drew no bidders isn't the end of the world, there'll be a new round next year.
By next year hopefully the market will have settled down and people will be confident to invest, as they have at increasingly cheaper rates for previous years.
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%?
If we exclude People Polling (sorry if any academics from Kent are looking in), the peak Trusstershambles polls were Lab 55-56, Con 19-20.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
Because you say so? Or do you have a valid argument with the graph?
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing 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.
But core support used to be about 30%, David. It's now 25%.
What price 20%?
If we exclude People Polling (sorry if any academics from Kent are looking in), the peak Trusstershambles polls were Lab 55-56, Con 19-20.
So there's that for Sunak. For now.
Realistically I think Truss would have achieved 0% approval from Tory members after her (and the fall-guy Kwarteng's) budget. So that must have been notional LDs and Labour saying they'd support her.
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.
The two minutes before a call back is actually the most plausible part to explain. Plenty of phones have that sort of feature configurable, even if it’s not engaged by default. If your phone has never connected to the car, then it’s almost certainly a sequence of events initiated either by the other party to the call, your friend or his phone, or from someone close to or inside the car.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy?
New contracts have been signed for a few years now without subsidy.
There were no signatures this time, but given the turmoil in the market that's not that unusual.
Many systems operate with auctions with no bidders from time to time. That's why you have reserves, so if you don't get what you want it gets passed in and can be reauctioned again later on.
The very few unsubsidised wind farms in the UK exist by virtue of the fact that companies like Amazon and Tesco are have power purchase agreements with them.
"The commercial companies, who buy the electricity, almost certainly do so to comply with recently introduced pressure via the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting framework, which is embedded in the Companies Act and thus backed by criminal sanctions, to demonstrate their commitment to carbon reduction and to renewable energy."
- those costs will simply be passed to Amazon and Tesco customers at check out, so are a subsidy by any other name.
Furthermore, they are paid for generating power whether or not they are constrained (switching off deliberately to avoid grid overload), and on the other side of the grid bottleneck, gas producers must fire up to make up the shortfall, which they do, at premium prices, passing the cost on to the energy consumer, so again, subsidy of wind, but masked as high gas prices.
There are no genuinely subsidy-free wind farms in the UK.
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.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
Half the PCP briefing against the leader, with multiple opinion pieces and commentary as to how it’s the end of the world as we know it.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
Half the PCP briefing against the leader, with multiple opinion pieces and commentary as to how it’s the end of the world as we know it.
As we saw a year ago.
Some years ago I felt that the Tories had an abundance of talent at their disposal. Quite how everyone concerned happened to have car crashes is quite odd. (It happened with Labour too). Something about our system is setting up people to fail.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Since you are discussing energy, this thought: One of the interesting features of the nuke Bill Gates wants to build in Wyoming is that would be capable of storing energy, to some extent. (It would be able to heat the sodium "coolant" to several hundred degrees above the usual operating temperature, when there was less demand for electricity. You would have to know far more than I do whether that would make it a good match for wind power in Wyoming, where Terrapower plans to build the first one, but it is certainly an idea worth investigating.)
Putting it in Wyoming makes political sense, too, since it could replace some of the lost coal mining jobs. https://www.terrapower.com/
(If you haven't heard the joke about anvils and wind in Wyoming, search for 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Those would be the new contracts which aren't attracting any bidders because there's not enough subsidy? So you're comparing historically high gas prices with fictional wind prices?
The bidders have big spreadsheets that contain estimates of capital cost plus financing cost (these builds are heavily leveraged so the cost of debt has a big impact) on one side, and then the future strike price needed to be achieved to deliver a positive NPV at whatever the current cost of capital is.
What the auctions do is set the future price government will commit to pay for power. It's the same mechanism as used for Nuclear and other large scale capital projects including for example road building or rail franchises. Is that a subsidy? You could argue it is in the sense that government is stepping in to guarantee a return. The issue is that wind once constructed is very cheap, and plentiful at times electricity is cheap. So it drives down the electricity price. But that guaranteed strike price has been falling for years. The reason it's bumped up is that the capex cost has risen because of inflation and the funding cost has soared because of interest rates (at least in part because of Truss).
Again we are comparing apples with oranges. Gas has low initial capital outlay and an ongoing and volatile input cost, which is also non-renewable and is making the world hot. Nuclear, wind, tidal, solar etc have much greater capital outlay and then negligible input costs once built. It's classical rent vs buy stuff.
It isn't, because that concept would only apply (though it is somewhat flawed anyway, because there are decomissioning costs, and backup generation costs) if the Government were building the Wind Farms at the taxpayers' expense, then relaying the free power. What is actually happening is that commercial entities are building wind farms, and they need to be paid. The 'dream' of a massive overcapacity of wind dealing with all our power issues is therefore just that - in actuality the constraint payments would be obscene.
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.
The two minutes before a call back is actually the most plausible part to explain. Plenty of phones have that sort of feature configurable, even if it’s not engaged by default. If your phone has never connected to the car, then it’s almost certainly a sequence of events initiated either by the other party to the call, your friend or his phone, or from someone close to or inside the car.
Or else it was the poltergeist. 👻
A bloke to look out for is Ian Stevenson who spent his life doing reasonably rigorous research into the paranormal. he is best known for reincarnation studies, but his other stuff - on weird stuff, impossible coincidence, prognostications, getting a warning phone call to you as you pass a phone box sort of stuff is also interesting. All in academic journals and university publishers. I have never met anyone quite like him.
Conclusions: No idea, world is strange. But this stuff keeps on happening.
There were 4 GB by-elections before the 2019 general election. That general election saw a 4.6% swing from Labour to the Conservatives. The below table shows the Lab->Con swing in the by-election and in the nearest poll to the by-election.
By-election Date By-election swing Nearest poll swing Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 4.6 0.6 Newport W 04-Apr-19 2.4 -1.4 Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -8.3 -3.4 Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 1.4 7.6
The two earlier by-elections' swings were closer than what we saw in the poll. The two latter by-elections' swings were further away than the polling.
In only Newport West were the Labour and Conservatives the top two parties, so most of the by-election swings are a bit odd.
If we look at the top two parties:
By-election Date Swing From who to who Equivalent at general West Tyrone 03-May-18 -0.5 DUP to SF -1.3 at general Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 -19 LD to Lab -6.1 at general Newport W 04-Apr-19 -2.4 Con to Lab -4.6 at general Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -23 Brexit to Lab -5.0 at general Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 12 Con to LD 1.5 at general
Two of those are close-ish, but the swings involving the LDs or the Brexit Party are massively exaggerated compared to general election performance.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
No, not really.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
I'm shocked! Shocked to find that dodgy data are being posted here ...
There is no dodgy data. Barty is annoyed that I was using the real average price of wind rather than the 'future' average price of it.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
Compliance! (rounded to nearest integer, * = LD wins)
Somerton* = 29% Con > LD* Uxbridge = 7% Con > Lab Selby = 23% Con > Lab West Lancs = 11% Con > Lab Stretford = 11% Con > Lab Chester = 14% Con > Lab Wakefield = 14% Con > Lab Tiverton* = 30% Con > LD* Erdington = 5% Con > Lab Southend West = "uncontested" by Lab or LD North Salop* = 34% Con > LD* Old Bexley = 10% Con > Lab Batley = 3% Lab > Con Chesham* = 25% Con > LD* Airdrie = 3% SNP > Lab Hartlepool = 16% Lab > Con
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
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.
The two minutes before a call back is actually the most plausible part to explain. Plenty of phones have that sort of feature configurable, even if it’s not engaged by default. If your phone has never connected to the car, then it’s almost certainly a sequence of events initiated either by the other party to the call, your friend or his phone, or from someone close to or inside the car.
Or else it was the poltergeist. 👻
Occam's Razor. I know which explanation my money is on.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
Compliance! (rounded to nearest integer, * = LD wins)
Somerton* = 29% Con > LD* Uxbridge = 7% Con > Lab Selby = 23% Con > Lab West Lancs = 11% Con > Lab Stretford = 11% Con > Lab Chester = 14% Con > Lab Wakefield = 14% Con > Lab Tiverton* = 30% Con > LD* Erdington = 5% Con > Lab Southend West = "uncontested" by Lab or LD North Salop* = 34% Con > LD* Old Bexley = 10% Con > Lab Batley = 3% Lab > Con Chesham* = 25% Con > LD* Airdrie = 3% SNP > Lab Hartlepool = 16% Lab > Con
That gives an average Con>Lab swing in Con/Lab seats of 7.6%, and an average Con>LD swing on Con/LD seats of 29.5%. (Polling currently says there's a 15% Con>Lab swing and a 10% Con>LD swing.)
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
Lots of wind energy worldwide is now installed without any subsidies whatsoever.
So presumably these companies are just throwing money away for fun?
Forgive the ignorance but has the Welsh government actually changed 30 mph signs to 20 mph signs? If so it must have cost a fortune.
They should have just changed the speed limits to kilometres per hour and kept the old signs. It would have had the added political benefit of starting a culture war about metrification.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
Sunak won't go, or be challenged, before the GE. No-one with ambition will not prefer to wait till Sunak has taken the buffeting from the 2024 election, as winning look more or less impossible and virtual wipe out is thinkable.
This is not 1992, this is 1997. In 1992 the Tories had made terrible mistakes but they still had stellar leadership and a core philosophy, and Labour were below first rate, and the left still mattered enough to scare Tories.
In 1997 the Tories had run out of ideas, and Labour was first rate in every department.
Both Tory and Labour are less good than they were in 1997, but all politics is relative. Labour don't have to run faster than the bear, they have to run faster than the Tories.
There were 4 GB by-elections before the 2019 general election. That general election saw a 4.6% swing from Labour to the Conservatives. The below table shows the Lab->Con swing in the by-election and in the nearest poll to the by-election.
By-election Date By-election swing Nearest poll swing Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 4.6 0.6 Newport W 04-Apr-19 2.4 -1.4 Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -8.3 -3.4 Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 1.4 7.6
The two earlier by-elections' swings were closer than what we saw in the poll. The two latter by-elections' swings were further away than the polling.
In only Newport West were the Labour and Conservatives the top two parties, so most of the by-election swings are a bit odd.
If we look at the top two parties:
By-election Date Swing From who to who Equivalent at general West Tyrone 03-May-18 -0.5 DUP to SF -1.3 at general Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 -19 LD to Lab -6.1 at general Newport W 04-Apr-19 -2.4 Con to Lab -4.6 at general Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -23 Brexit to Lab -5.0 at general Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 12 Con to LD 1.5 at general
Two of those are close-ish, but the swings involving the LDs or the Brexit Party are massively exaggerated compared to general election performance.
Sorry, I can't do maths apparently. Corrected figures:
By-election / Date / By-election swing / Nearest poll swing Lewisham East / 14-Jun-18 / 4.6 / 1.7 Newport W / 04-Apr-19 / 2.4 / -2.2 Peterborough / 06-Jun-19 / -8.3 / -2.2 Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 / 1.4 / 3.8
So, still, the polling was closer in the two latter cases, and the by-election was closer in the two former cases.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
Without the three conditions they had onside in 2019 - a totemic issue they stood alone on, an opposition leader considered a crank, and a charismatic leader/incumbent PM - the Tories failed to get a majority in 2017, only just snuck over the line in 2015, & needed a coalition in 2010.
Now they don’t have any of those advantages again, only it’s worse because they got rid of one of them themselves, upsetting a significant part of their vote in the process.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
Cannot wait for the Daily Mail to cover this on the front page on this waste of taxpayers' money going to lefty lawyers.
The government's justification for footing a £265,000 bill for Boris Johnson's Partygate inquiry legal fees has been criticised by the spending watchdog.
An inquiry by MPs found the former prime minister had deliberately misled Parliament over lockdown parties during the pandemic.
The top lawyers helping Mr Johnson were paid for with taxpayer funds.
The government has repeatedly defended using public money to cover the costs.
But following its inspection of government accounts, the National Audit Office (NAO) said it was not convinced by the reasoning behind the decision, saying it was not "wholly persuasive".
In an audit opinion, the government's spending watchdog said due process was not followed when signing off the money for Mr Johnson's lawyers.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
A really nasty, vicious piece. People defending it on here on the basis the slut reference in the title was the name of the troupe she was a member of.
Shameful. But, hey, it’s Marina and she’s quirky and edgy so it’s okay.
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
The wildcard might be a reaction against the prospect of a massive Labour landslide, similar to the dynamics of the 2017 campaign but in reverse.
I can't see it being the Tories that benefit, so they could end up pushed into third place and some other party will become the main opposition.
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
I’m pretty instinctively a Tory kind of guy. A Unionist through and through, proud to be British, a believer in capitalism and private enterprise, encouraging people to work hard to get on and rewarding ambition.
I really have no idea what this government is about anymore. It is high tax, low service, short sighted and, particularly anywhere near the Home Office, deeply unpleasant bordering on unBritish. I am in something approaching despair. What on earth happened to Cameron’s new Tories?
Forgive the ignorance but has the Welsh government actually changed 30 mph signs to 20 mph signs? If so it must have cost a fortune.
Yes and circa 30 million
It is reported 97% of 30mph areas have been changed
Old signs in landfill I guess?
I doubt it. Aren't road signs made of steel? Nobody puts steel in landfill. Look, I know everyone is desperate to come up with a reason to hate this policy, other than the fact that they think getting somewhere slightly quicker is more important than not killing children, but the amount of bizarre made up claims on this thread has to be a new PB record. Twenty is plenty, people!
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
This is right. It isn't enough for Tory MPs to conclude that Sunak is a liability in that he slips to being less popular than his party (which isn't the case at the moment anyway on most polls).
They also need to think that the act of defenestration wouldn't in itself hurt them still further, and that the new leader they end up with would be better. The new leader has to be an MP, ruling out at least one person of note. Any vaguely capable contender would far rather be the shiny new Leader of the Opposition after an election than the hapless mug who got a shellacking after a handful of months at the helm so will be really hard to persuade to step up rather than wait a short time. That just leaves the howling mad and the terminally sh1t, who aren't an obvious improvement to say the least.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
In fairness, Marina Hyde I think directly references that piece in her article today, saying, "A year later, Baillie sold an interview and underwear photoshoot to the Sun in which she said the media maelstrom had sent her “insane”, subsequently telling the Guardian she was “a tart with a heart, a nice girl”. I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing."
She's wrong about the "a year later" though. This was after the furore had died down but only about three months later.
Labour need to actually win at least 1 of the 3 by-elections coming up. Otherwise figures like this won't count for much.
By-elections are an interesting complement to polling, but they have fairly limited impact on how people vote subsequently. If Labour come a close second in Tamworth and Mid Beds, that still indicates a general election landslide, even if they don't get the same positive headlines. Failing to win Rutherglen, an easier target, would be a bad sign, but if polling like the above is accurate, Labour will get a majority on gains in England & Wales without needing to take a single seat off the SNP.
Yes, Labour could fail to win all three by-elections and still win the GE. But that would nevertheless indicate that people aren’t itching to vote Labour.
Close second places in all 3 would not be particularly inconsistent with current polling.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
By-elections should be better predictors than polling, because they involve people actually having to vote, rather than just telling a pollster they will, and the non-response bias is a lot lower, even with catastrophically low turnouts.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
Compliance! (rounded to nearest integer, * = LD wins)
Somerton* = 29% Con > LD* Uxbridge = 7% Con > Lab Selby = 23% Con > Lab West Lancs = 11% Con > Lab Stretford = 11% Con > Lab Chester = 14% Con > Lab Wakefield = 14% Con > Lab Tiverton* = 30% Con > LD* Erdington = 5% Con > Lab Southend West = "uncontested" by Lab or LD North Salop* = 34% Con > LD* Old Bexley = 10% Con > Lab Batley = 3% Lab > Con Chesham* = 25% Con > LD* Airdrie = 3% SNP > Lab Hartlepool = 16% Lab > Con
That gives an average Con>Lab swing in Con/Lab seats of 7.6%, and an average Con>LD swing on Con/LD seats of 29.5%. (Polling currently says there's a 15% Con>Lab swing and a 10% Con>LD swing.)
But did you account for the swings AWAY from Lab in Hartlepool and Batley & Spen?
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
I’m pretty instinctively a Tory kind of guy. A Unionist through and through, proud to be British, a believer in capitalism and private enterprise, encouraging people to work hard to get on and rewarding ambition.
I really have no idea what this government is about anymore. It is high tax, low service, short sighted and, particularly anywhere near the Home Office, deeply unpleasant bordering on unBritish. I am in something approaching despair. What on earth happened to Cameron’s new Tories?
Short answer: they lost the referendum.
Long answer: Cameroonism didn't really have a good answer to the question "what are the Conservatives for?" The coalition was a bit of an "in office, not in power" experience and some sort of reaction against that was probably inevitable. I don't like the form that has taken any more than you, but I can sort of understand it. Add to that the change in the age graph; the Conservatives are a "waiting for God" party now in a way they weren't before. That has consequences.
As for the higher tax, lower services issue... I'm willing to cut Sunak some slack there, though I wish he'd be honest about it. The UK has been writing post-dated cheques for decades, and the electorate has rewarded governments for doing that. They were bound to be cashed eventually, and it's not entirely Sunak's fault that it's on his watch.
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.
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
I’m pretty instinctively a Tory kind of guy. A Unionist through and through, proud to be British, a believer in capitalism and private enterprise, encouraging people to work hard to get on and rewarding ambition.
I really have no idea what this government is about anymore. It is high tax, low service, short sighted and, particularly anywhere near the Home Office, deeply unpleasant bordering on unBritish. I am in something approaching despair. What on earth happened to Cameron’s new Tories?
Exactly right. If you want to make a case for wipe-out, it is in this area. I have voted Tory in GEs for nearly 50 years, and while I keep an open mind I think the chance of doing so this time is very close to Zero. Not least because the Tories need to lose bigly and be in opposition to get rid of all their worst people, decide what they actually believe, what are their core non negotiable principles and attract stellar talent again.
Labour are, for all their faults, far closer to One Nation Toryism than the current Tories. Not so much as to policies - policy is hard at the moment - but they (this is amazing, and a very quick turnaround) give to me a greater sense of loving their country than the Tories do.
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.
So that we know what to look out for - in what ways would the Tories in meltdown look different from what we are seeing now?
That's the brilliant psychological experiment that the mice are currently running.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Meltdown to me means another 1922 committee palaver with the entire parliamentary party stabbing each other in the back. One thing they've sort of managed in the last year is a modicum of unity.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
When it becomes clear that keeping him is more costly electorally than offing him, he'll go. His personal polling falling beneath that of the party would be a sign.
The trouble is there is no king or queen across the water. No Boris.
This is right. It isn't enough for Tory MPs to conclude that Sunak is a liability in that he slips to being less popular than his party (which isn't the case at the moment anyway on most polls).
They also need to think that the act of defenestration wouldn't in itself hurt them still further, and that the new leader they end up with would be better. The new leader has to be an MP, ruling out at least one person of note. Any vaguely capable contender would far rather be the shiny new Leader of the Opposition after an election than the hapless mug who got a shellacking after a handful of months at the helm so will be really hard to persuade to step up rather than wait a short time. That just leaves the howling mad and the terminally sh1t, who aren't an obvious improvement to say the least.
I just can't see it.
The only one is Penny. I'm a fan of the person, but not necessarily the policy agenda of Penny, but she's always been fairly cagey about that anyway.
I think Penny is the only one that Charles would have as PM without making an awful constitutional fuss. I can't see him happily installing Steve Barclay as PM, he'd demand a GE. Penny's sword carrying means he'd probably go with her as caretaker PM. I'd like Penny as the face, with a Trussite/Redwoodite agenda. I don't think the latter is guaranteed, possibly not even likely, but the very presence of a new leader would mean a shift in policy was demanded. Nobody wants a new leader to do a 'better' version of Sunakism.
For those admiring Marina Hyde's article today it is worth reading the article she wrote at the time of Brand's unpleasant call to Andrew Sachs about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. Ms Hyde didn't simply ignore her - as today's mea culpa says. She went after her - and pretty viciously.
A really nasty, vicious piece. People defending it on here on the basis the slut reference in the title was the name of the troupe she was a member of.
Shameful. But, hey, it’s Marina and she’s quirky and edgy so it’s okay.
Patriarchy has always relied on female covert and overt collaboration.
I was recently reading an interesting work by Ariel Levy "Female Chauvinist Pigs" that explores some of the issues in 3rd wave feminism. A bit American, but nonetheless interesting. I found the bit about Lesbian and Boi culture quite an eye-opener.
What a dull life I lead in quiet provincial monogamy in comparison!
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.
At the risk of turning into @Heathener, the prospect of something close to a Tory wipe out is being underplayed.
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
I’m pretty instinctively a Tory kind of guy. A Unionist through and through, proud to be British, a believer in capitalism and private enterprise, encouraging people to work hard to get on and rewarding ambition.
I really have no idea what this government is about anymore. It is high tax, low service, short sighted and, particularly anywhere near the Home Office, deeply unpleasant bordering on unBritish. I am in something approaching despair. What on earth happened to Cameron’s new Tories?
Short answer: they lost the referendum.
Long answer: Cameroonism didn't really have a good answer to the question "what are the Conservatives for?" The coalition was a bit of an "in office, not in power" experience and some sort of reaction against that was probably inevitable. I don't like the form that has taken any more than you, but I can sort of understand it. Add to that the change in the age graph; the Conservatives are a "waiting for God" party now in a way they weren't before. That has consequences.
As for the higher tax, lower services issue... I'm willing to cut Sunak some slack there, though I wish he'd be honest about it. The UK has been writing post-dated cheques for decades, and the electorate has rewarded governments for doing that. They were bound to be cashed eventually, and it's not entirely Sunak's fault that it's on his watch.
I agree we have been living in and voting for a Ponzi scheme all my adult life and that is getting harder. The huge capital surplus we had has been spent, the trade deficit is becoming structural in that so many assets have been sold to fund it and North Sea oil is pretty much depleted. I worry for my children.
- 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.
Really?
Yes, really.
Lots of wind energy worldwide is now installed without any subsidies whatsoever.
So presumably these companies are just throwing money away for fun?
Comments
(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.
The Guardian, eh? Dontcha luv it.
"Anyway, about halfway down Georgina manages to wrench the subject matter back to herself – she hasn't the most gossamer of authorial touches, bless her – as she drones:
"I then realised that although he had sent a letter of apology to my family, he never actually directly addressed me with an apology...."
Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go."
And in her article today she specifically castigates Brand for not having apologised to Baillie.
But the Guardian, eh?
Polling on “But that means I need to spend two hours getting three buses to work, because my car is being taxed out of existence”, might yield a different result.
Your source used dodgy data equating old contracts as the supposed price for new ones which is false.
As bondegezou, I and many others have said to you, the price has fallen considerably so using old contracts (which are no longer available for new developments) as the new price is just a lie.
Don't you mean fusion-fed vegetable power?
Veg-fed fusion is what you get in trendy eating places, no?
In today's Times, "three writers" anonymously admit to doing things like stealing small items from supermarkets, hotels and such-like, or putting a 90p breadroll from Waitrose through as a 50p roll. Middle-class thievery.
There were no signatures this time, but given the turmoil in the market that's not that unusual.
Many systems operate with auctions with no bidders from time to time. That's why you have reserves, so if you don't get what you want it gets passed in and can be reauctioned again later on.
By-elections are very exciting, and full of betting opportunities, but I don’t think they’re better predictors than polling, and we know what the current polling says.
What the auctions do is set the future price government will commit to pay for power. It's the same mechanism as used for Nuclear and other large scale capital projects including for example road building or rail franchises. Is that a subsidy? You could argue it is in the sense that government is stepping in to guarantee a return. The issue is that wind once constructed is very cheap, and plentiful at times electricity is cheap. So it drives down the electricity price. But that guaranteed strike price has been falling for years. The reason it's bumped up is that the capex cost has risen because of inflation and the funding cost has soared because of interest rates (at least in part because of Truss).
Again we are comparing apples with oranges. Gas has low initial capital outlay and an ongoing and volatile input cost, which is also non-renewable and is making the world hot. Nuclear, wind, tidal, solar etc have much greater capital outlay and then negligible input costs once built. It's classical rent vs buy stuff.
Perhaps it's worth adding up all the by-election swings from this Parliament...
So swings and roundabouts.
I’d love to see the maths for a comparison of by-election swings vs contemporary polling as predictors of general election results. I would be surprised if it doesn’t say polling is better.
Which makes perfect sense, because the strike price is going to be for years in the future so you want it to be good value. Just because this latest round drew no bidders isn't the end of the world, there'll be a new round next year.
By next year hopefully the market will have settled down and people will be confident to invest, as they have at increasingly cheaper rates for previous years.
So there's that for Sunak. For now.
Or else it was the poltergeist. 👻
"The commercial companies, who buy the electricity, almost certainly do so to comply with recently introduced pressure via the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting framework, which is embedded in the Companies Act and thus backed by criminal sanctions, to demonstrate their commitment to carbon reduction and to renewable energy."
- those costs will simply be passed to Amazon and Tesco customers at check out, so are a subsidy by any other name.
Furthermore, they are paid for generating power whether or not they are constrained (switching off deliberately to avoid grid overload), and on the other side of the grid bottleneck, gas producers must fire up to make up the shortfall, which they do, at premium prices, passing the cost on to the energy consumer, so again, subsidy of wind, but masked as high gas prices.
There are no genuinely subsidy-free wind farms in the UK.
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/372-why-are-unsubsidised-wind-farms-receiving-constraint-payments
As we saw a year ago.
Sunak looks like a loser. Different methodologies make it hard to compare, but he's doing about as badly as Major in '96. And he doesn't have the residual kudos for being an election winner in his own right. And Britain is not, as the slogan went, Booming, or showing any signs of preparing to boom.
Standard Operating Procedure here is change leader and hope. But for the reasons listed by @david_herdson upthread, that's not really an option. So all they can do is hang on and hope.
They clearly want to melt down, but they aren't allowed to. The sort of torture some people pay good money for. Apparently.
Putting it in Wyoming makes political sense, too, since it could replace some of the lost coal mining jobs.
https://www.terrapower.com/
(If you haven't heard the joke about anvils and wind in Wyoming, search for it.)
GoSafe announce speed they will prosecute drivers on 20mph roads in Wales
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/gosafe-announce-speed-prosecute-drivers-27742796#ICID=Android_DailyPostNewsApp_AppShare
Conclusions: No idea, world is strange. But this stuff keeps on happening.
There were 4 GB by-elections before the 2019 general election. That general election saw a 4.6% swing from Labour to the Conservatives. The below table shows the Lab->Con swing in the by-election and in the nearest poll to the by-election.
By-election Date By-election swing Nearest poll swing
Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 4.6 0.6
Newport W 04-Apr-19 2.4 -1.4
Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -8.3 -3.4
Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 1.4 7.6
The two earlier by-elections' swings were closer than what we saw in the poll. The two latter by-elections' swings were further away than the polling.
In only Newport West were the Labour and Conservatives the top two parties, so most of the by-election swings are a bit odd.
If we look at the top two parties:
By-election Date Swing From who to who Equivalent at general
West Tyrone 03-May-18 -0.5 DUP to SF -1.3 at general
Lewisham East 14-Jun-18 -19 LD to Lab -6.1 at general
Newport W 04-Apr-19 -2.4 Con to Lab -4.6 at general
Peterborough 06-Jun-19 -23 Brexit to Lab -5.0 at general
Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 12 Con to LD 1.5 at general
Two of those are close-ish, but the swings involving the LDs or the Brexit Party are massively exaggerated compared to general election performance.
I think the final attempted regicide before the election is there, in the background. It may not happen or it may. A bit like the Prigozhin mutiny (and like that one, I think Sunak would see off the mutineers). Some of the early signs are there.
Somerton* = 29% Con > LD*
Uxbridge = 7% Con > Lab
Selby = 23% Con > Lab
West Lancs = 11% Con > Lab
Stretford = 11% Con > Lab
Chester = 14% Con > Lab
Wakefield = 14% Con > Lab
Tiverton* = 30% Con > LD*
Erdington = 5% Con > Lab
Southend West = "uncontested" by Lab or LD
North Salop* = 34% Con > LD*
Old Bexley = 10% Con > Lab
Batley = 3% Lab > Con
Chesham* = 25% Con > LD*
Airdrie = 3% SNP > Lab
Hartlepool = 16% Lab > Con
It is reported 97% of 30mph areas have been changed
So presumably these companies are just throwing money away for fun?
This is not 1992, this is 1997. In 1992 the Tories had made terrible mistakes but they still had stellar leadership and a core philosophy, and Labour were below first rate, and the left still mattered enough to scare Tories.
In 1997 the Tories had run out of ideas, and Labour was first rate in every department.
Both Tory and Labour are less good than they were in 1997, but all politics is relative. Labour don't have to run faster than the bear, they have to run faster than the Tories.
What a wretched woman.
By-election / Date / By-election swing / Nearest poll swing
Lewisham East / 14-Jun-18 / 4.6 / 1.7
Newport W / 04-Apr-19 / 2.4 / -2.2
Peterborough / 06-Jun-19 / -8.3 / -2.2
Brecon and R 01-Aug-19 / 1.4 / 3.8
So, still, the polling was closer in the two latter cases, and the by-election was closer in the two former cases.
Now they don’t have any of those advantages again, only it’s worse because they got rid of one of them themselves, upsetting a significant part of their vote in the process.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2009/jan/26/celebrity
Just because it's never happened (ignoring what happened to the Liberals) and just because they've existed for so long (so had the Liberals) doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
The government's justification for footing a £265,000 bill for Boris Johnson's Partygate inquiry legal fees has been criticised by the spending watchdog.
An inquiry by MPs found the former prime minister had deliberately misled Parliament over lockdown parties during the pandemic.
The top lawyers helping Mr Johnson were paid for with taxpayer funds.
The government has repeatedly defended using public money to cover the costs.
But following its inspection of government accounts, the National Audit Office (NAO) said it was not convinced by the reasoning behind the decision, saying it was not "wholly persuasive".
In an audit opinion, the government's spending watchdog said due process was not followed when signing off the money for Mr Johnson's lawyers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66852723
Shameful. But, hey, it’s Marina and she’s quirky and edgy so it’s okay.
I can't see it being the Tories that benefit, so they could end up pushed into third place and some other party will become the main opposition.
I really have no idea what this government is about anymore. It is high tax, low service, short sighted and, particularly anywhere near the Home Office, deeply unpleasant bordering on unBritish. I am in something approaching despair. What on earth happened to Cameron’s new Tories?
Look, I know everyone is desperate to come up with a reason to hate this policy, other than the fact that they think getting somewhere slightly quicker is more important than not killing children, but the amount of bizarre made up claims on this thread has to be a new PB record.
Twenty is plenty, people!
I’m in albi. A county town of 50,000 people
Not exactly Paris but big enough to have life. Especially at 7pm on a balmy weekday evening
This is one of the main roads, in the centre, right now
They also need to think that the act of defenestration wouldn't in itself hurt them still further, and that the new leader they end up with would be better. The new leader has to be an MP, ruling out at least one person of note. Any vaguely capable contender would far rather be the shiny new Leader of the Opposition after an election than the hapless mug who got a shellacking after a handful of months at the helm so will be really hard to persuade to step up rather than wait a short time. That just leaves the howling mad and the terminally sh1t, who aren't an obvious improvement to say the least.
I just can't see it.
She's wrong about the "a year later" though. This was after the furore had died down but only about three months later.
Long answer: Cameroonism didn't really have a good answer to the question "what are the Conservatives for?" The coalition was a bit of an "in office, not in power" experience and some sort of reaction against that was probably inevitable. I don't like the form that has taken any more than you, but I can sort of understand it. Add to that the change in the age graph; the Conservatives are a "waiting for God" party now in a way they weren't before. That has consequences.
As for the higher tax, lower services issue... I'm willing to cut Sunak some slack there, though I wish he'd be honest about it. The UK has been writing post-dated cheques for decades, and the electorate has rewarded governments for doing that. They were bound to be cashed eventually, and it's not entirely Sunak's fault that it's on his watch.
I won't have anything negative said about Marina Hyde!
Labour are, for all their faults, far closer to One Nation Toryism than the current Tories. Not so much as to policies - policy is hard at the moment - but they (this is amazing, and a very quick turnaround) give to me a greater sense of loving their country than the Tories do.
I think Penny is the only one that Charles would have as PM without making an awful constitutional fuss. I can't see him happily installing Steve Barclay as PM, he'd demand a GE. Penny's sword carrying means he'd probably go with her as caretaker PM. I'd like Penny as the face, with a Trussite/Redwoodite agenda. I don't think the latter is guaranteed, possibly not even likely, but the very presence of a new leader would mean a shift in policy was demanded. Nobody wants a new leader to do a 'better' version of Sunakism.
I was recently reading an interesting work by Ariel Levy "Female Chauvinist Pigs" that explores some of the issues in 3rd wave feminism. A bit American, but nonetheless interesting. I found the bit about Lesbian and Boi culture quite an eye-opener.
What a dull life I lead in quiet provincial monogamy in comparison!