Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
I see a lot of whining on LBC about Labours plan to remove charitable status from private schools .
Why should the public be expected to subsidize these ?
Even if we were to accept the premise of your question (zero rating for VAT is not a subsidy), the answer would be 'because the parents are already paying for the state provision of education and deciding not to use it'.
In these conversations it quickly becomes apparent how much people with kids at private school resent paying taxes to finance state education. Then we wonder why a government composed of (and from a party financed by) people who mostly send their kids to private school won't fund state education properly.
Politics of envy much? You are absolutely projecting.
I've never understood the mentality of obviously articulate people, who have evidently done well in life still, carrying such a chip on their shoulder.
If it's the politics of envy to want to make sure that there is meritocratic and equitable education for all children - call me a member of the Green Eyed Monster Party.
In that case, you should bring back grammar schools. Because I have bad news for you - the state sector isn't meritocratic of equitable at all. And wouldn't be if private schools are abolished. Because house prices.
Grammar schools are also bad - literally areas that still have the 11 plus show bigger disparities in educational outcomes. Why? Because people who are wealthy can pay for their kids to have tutoring to pass the 11 plus, and therefore funnel investment into grammar schools whilst ignoring state schools. State school education is bad partly because that is the system we have with private schools as well.
Do you also want to abolish house prices?
Frankly, your idealistic positions sound like those of the 14 year olds I used to debate at school.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
Do you think that the “ system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.” would end if the public schools vanished? All that would happen is that the wealthy parents would all be sending their children to the schools in their very wealthy catchment area all together, those kids would continue to be in a bubble from the start of education and still all be connected just the name of the schools would change.
Those state schools would likely also find that parent fundraising drives would generate shitloads of money, especially as they don’t need to pay for fees, in order to build those area’s state schools a new gym or theatre or science lab and so they would have better facilities and still a two tier education system and the kids who couldn’t go to Eton still don’t get a look in because their parents cannot afford to buy or rent in the catchment area where all the parents who used to send the kids to public school are living and taking up the school places locally.
Is this only about abolishing private schools? No. But it should be a start.
I don't think state schools should be allowed to do private fundraising. If they need things and can justify it to the state, the state should provide. The wealth of the parents or local whoever should not be able to be a factor in the quality of education children get.
Abolishing private schooling wouldn't be enough to ensure equality because some devious parents could teach their children things themselves or pay for private tuition. Would you try to ban that too?
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
The problem with this is the universal problem of politics. Just as philosophy is the study of issues that can't be solved, politics is the art of making hard choices between contested alternatives with finite resources, infinite demand and regular elections.
This can't be delegated away from politics. Those to whom it is delegated become themselves part of the political process.
Long term infrastructure involves many of the hardest and most contested choices both in terms of general policy (nuclear or wind or tides; rail or road or 3rd runway) and raw politics (where to build 2 million houses).
I agree on the substance of this, it will of course remain a politically contested area as indeed it should, but I think there are institutional arrangements that can leave the politicians to set the direction but not meddle day to day and allow for a longer term focus to dictate these decisions. HS2 - which I think is a fundamentally sound idea - has become the poster child for how not to manage these projects. We are in danger of becoming a country where major infrastructure development becomes impossible - and that really is not a country that any of us should want to live in.
Arrangements to put matters "beyond politics" are just as dangerous as the politics.
Triple Lock, anyone?
The triple lock is hardly beyond politics, it's pretty much all politicians ever talk about.
It is beyond politics, in the sense that, the politicians are bound to it. Yes, they fiddle with it, where they can't be immediately detected. But all the political parties will keep it.
Starmer isn't going to start the first Labour government in a long while with an assault on the Welfare State. Which is what removing the Triple Lock will be seen as, in the Labour party.
The only plausible route is, I think, gradually merging NI into income tax and equalising taxes for pensioners.
And abolishing higher rate tax relief on pension contributions, a step rarely advocated by pundits paying higher rate income tax.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
Do you think that the “ system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.” would end if the public schools vanished? All that would happen is that the wealthy parents would all be sending their children to the schools in their very wealthy catchment area all together, those kids would continue to be in a bubble from the start of education and still all be connected just the name of the schools would change.
Those state schools would likely also find that parent fundraising drives would generate shitloads of money, especially as they don’t need to pay for fees, in order to build those area’s state schools a new gym or theatre or science lab and so they would have better facilities and still a two tier education system and the kids who couldn’t go to Eton still don’t get a look in because their parents cannot afford to buy or rent in the catchment area where all the parents who used to send the kids to public school are living and taking up the school places locally.
Is this only about abolishing private schools? No. But it should be a start.
I don't think state schools should be allowed to do private fundraising. If they need things and can justify it to the state, the state should provide. The wealth of the parents or local whoever should not be able to be a factor in the quality of education children get.
There are, IIRC, limits on what state schools can spend money given to them privately on. I think they aren't allowed to use it for paying teachers, for example.
A little over a decade ago, a primary school we know had some roofing work done. It is a small single-storey building, and scaffolding was put up along one side.
Along with this, they put up a scaffolding staircase, which was probably about half the total scaffolding used, and a materials hoist. I can understand the need for a materials hoist; but the staircase seemed an utter extravagance and waste of money over plain old ladders - which the people doing the work apparently later added.
It is *really* easy to waste money on construction - particularly if it is other people's money.
The money wasted on unnecessary Health & Safety in construction is huge and mainly pointless
Unnecessary H&S is by definition completely pointless. There is also necessary H&S.
To be fair it can be really difficult to know what is 'necessary' and 'unnecessary' H&S; you cannot tell what a provision did to prevent an incident if the incident did not occur. As avoiding injuries and deaths is seen as vital (and rightly so), it becomes necessary to chuck money at H&S.
It's easy to say the money was wasted, unless it's your health or life on the line, doing the work. But sometimes the work needs to be done, and excess H&S can actually prevent work from being done.
IMV the scaffolding staircase I mentioned below was unnecessary, especially as the people doing the work added ladders themselves, and other, higher, jobs, seem to manage without it. But neither do I want to go back to other, more dangerous, practices.
Yes, H&S is one of those good ideas that gets discredited by being carried to extremes.
I had an uncle died on a demolition site in 1950 when he was hit on the head by an oxygen bottle. No hard hats in those days, mate. Such a simple precaution would have saved him.
Now I go to the park and see a four foot high ornamental water fountain with a large yellow sign on it saying 'Caution, slippery when wet', and I think to myself 'Somebody got paid for doing that?'
Same everywhere, I suppose. No matter how sound the idea, there will be wankers who carry it beyond its useful extremities.
Or wankers who try to sue you if you don't CYA in that very manner, alas. So insurers demand ...
I Imagine a lot of that sort of thing is down to children. I forget the exact legislation, but I do recall from my professional training that children were a big problem - you couldn't just put up a Keep Out notice, as they were deemed irresponsible, unable to comprehend such things, etc.
Edit: possibly HASAWA. Which also covers visitors official and otherwise, IIRC.
You can't even simply put hazardous waste in a bin accessible by children as if it looks fun it's reasonably foreseeable they'll fish it out and play with it and could then harm themselves.
A valid consideration. When I was in secondary school,the first couple of years were spent in decrepit portacabins. While bored waiting for the teacher to turn up, a staple entertainment was picking polystyrene insulation out of the walls and dropping chunks through the safety mesh onto the electric heater, to watch them shrivel. It's a wonder we didn't burn the place down, and I shudder to think what kind of gases we were breathing in.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Spot on re Westminster. Restored as a national monument, perhaps used for ceremonial occasions, it would be a major asset to the country.
If they must have parliament in London I hear Old Oak Common is going to be well-connected.
I would demolish it. Ugly as feck neo-gothic monstrosity. Sell off the land to developers to cover the cost of the replacement fit for purpose parliament.
I'm feeling generous - keep the clock tower as it is a bit of a national symbol.
The new parliament could be built on redundant railway land at Toton, if that turns out to be the terminus for HS2.
The Treasury should be moved to somewhere between Manchester and Leeds (Saddleworth Moor?). Then HS2 might get completed to Manchester and Leeds.
I see a lot of whining on LBC about Labours plan to remove charitable status from private schools .
Why should the public be expected to subsidize these ?
Even if we were to accept the premise of your question (zero rating for VAT is not a subsidy), the answer would be 'because the parents are already paying for the state provision of education and deciding not to use it'.
In these conversations it quickly becomes apparent how much people with kids at private school resent paying taxes to finance state education. Then we wonder why a government composed of (and from a party financed by) people who mostly send their kids to private school won't fund state education properly.
Politics of envy much? You are absolutely projecting.
I've never understood the mentality of obviously articulate people, who have evidently done well in life still, carrying such a chip on their shoulder.
If it's the politics of envy to want to make sure that there is meritocratic and equitable education for all children - call me a member of the Green Eyed Monster Party.
In that case, you should bring back grammar schools. Because I have bad news for you - the state sector isn't meritocratic of equitable at all. And wouldn't be if private schools are abolished. Because house prices.
Grammar schools are also bad - literally areas that still have the 11 plus show bigger disparities in educational outcomes. Why? Because people who are wealthy can pay for their kids to have tutoring to pass the 11 plus, and therefore funnel investment into grammar schools whilst ignoring state schools. State school education is bad partly because that is the system we have with private schools as well.
Also, any idea that investment is funnelled into grammar schools is laughable.
At mine, our lockers and sports hall were from when the school was built, i.e. the 1960s.
I went back to visit 6 years ago. The lockers and sports hall was the same.
Meanwhile all the comps around here seem to get basically rebuilt ever 15 years...
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
I know that Parisian waiters have a reputation for being surly, but nobody faces persecution due to being unable to order a coffee.
Yes, a lot of people would rather be in the UK but France, but that isn't justification to come here.
The right to refuge isn't dependent on you stopping in the first safe country you can get to. This is a good thing, as a refugee crisis often causes serious problems for the country immediately adjacent to it whereas smaller numbers in a more distant country will tend to be less harmful or outright beneficial, so it's helpful if people who can keep moving do keep moving. Also if refugees go to places where they speak the language and/or have connections then this is better all around, as they'll need less support and find it easier to contribute.
There's a lot wrong with the way refugee treaties work but if they were changed to require you to settle in the nearest country where you were out of danger then it would be much worse than it is.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
You point out that Fiji have beaten England recently in a warm up whilst England were doing fitness cycles to prep for the WC but not that Wales could be considered to have been lucky to beat Fiji due to a lot of terrible reffing decisions in the match.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
I bet the Eton boys wouldn't have made that error.....
Foreign truck drivers who transport goods around Europe have staged a hunger strike in Germany as part of a weeks-long work stoppage, describing it as their “last hope” to draw attention to the exploitation they say they suffer.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
Only two hours?! I'd give BR till the end of the Month Boedromion.
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
This neatly illustrates the wider problem. You express the issue in terms of the rights and preferences of the refugee - preferring France to Greece, and UK to France. But millions of refugees live for years in tents in the desert with the most basic of conditions. For example the 600,000 in Chad.
One, large, group is given the barest rights. The others, good at the obstacle course, have every chance of sending their children to Oxford.
From where comes the justification for this disparity?
I think that disparity is bad too. I think they should all have the opportunity to have the option to go somewhere else and better. Again, the disparity is mostly created by western countries who pay other governments to keep the refugees far away from them - like how Turkey has been paid off by the EU for years to house Syrian refugees.
Good luck with that one. If Sir K decided he wants to lose the next election he could borrow that idea.
I understand it isn't politically viable, but the reason it isn't politically viable is just racism - pure and simple.
And if we treated refugees more equitably it would be easier for them to settle in to their new home country, socially and economically. The border regime of the modern nation state is a relatively new historical phenomena - it is by no means something that need continue.
There are a number of complex issues here.
1) I doubt if a country where 30% of its babies has a foreign born mother is an especially racist hellhole.
2) With refugees it seems to me that proximity, economic parity, and culture are in fact the biggest questions. The reality is that the UK has absorbed millions of people from abroad since WWII with a reasonable degree of success.
3) The relaxed borders of a former age belong to the time before cheap and rapid mass travel, and a time with a much smaller global population.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
Joys of the English language.
Torpenhow Hill is better than that one, it literally means "hill hill hill hill".
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
I know that Parisian waiters have a reputation for being surly, but nobody faces persecution due to being unable to order a coffee.
Yes, a lot of people would rather be in the UK but France, but that isn't justification to come here.
If you were fleeing a dangerous regime and wanted to start a new life from scratch, you'd probably want to go somewhere you could speak the language.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
The new price is reflected in the second hand market too. A three year old Picanto is going to be maybe £8k, a three years old £21k EV might be £14k. At 7 years old the Picanto is perhaps £3k and the EV £7k.
The problem with removing cheap new cars from the market is not that people who would have bought new now can't afford cars. It's that everyone is pushed out along the cost curve, running older, dirtier cars, and the poorest either get pushed off the end, or have to run vehicles past their economic design lives and get hit in the wallet for lots of repairs.
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
That might be a valid question but Braverman is not the one to be discussing it as she’s a psychopath without a shred of humanity . She wants to stop all asylum seekers from entering the UK as her simplistic argument re safe countries makes clear. The UK will never have to accept any asylum seekers from mainland Europe and the problem will just be dumped on them.
Then to go after gay people and women shows how clueless she is . And then her apparent comments about modern slavery when the IMB makes it easier for traffickers as those trafficked lose any government support .
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
It is a myth that compulsory purchases are the root of the insane extra costs of infrastructure in the UK versus France or Italy. For example these costs are around £3 bn for HS2, not £300 bn. The primary problem is the structure of cost plus contracts which effectively gives an open door for limitless cost over runs at no risk to the contractors. The revolving door between contractors and the delivery authority ensures that this cosy situation remains unchallenged. The lack of strategy in overall infrastructure design means delivery teams are dispersed at the end of each project and any in house expertise is lost.
In short because the Tories flamed the civil service, the government ministries must rely on expensive consultants who may not be any more than so-so.
It doesn't help that capital maintenance projects are the first thing that get cut since they are treated as an expense not as an essential part of avoiding long term asset degradation.
So the problem is fundamental and it is one the Tories themselves created.
Cost plus contracting is asking to be ripped off. Particularly when ministers constantly interfere to change plans.
Heseltine, whom we were discussing yesterday, tried to do away with it at the MoD.
Ministers of all stripes love to rail against 'government waste' but honestly, it's ministerial interference, the pushing and inevitable dropping of pet projects and so on that cause a lot of that waste.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
The problem with this is the universal problem of politics. Just as philosophy is the study of issues that can't be solved, politics is the art of making hard choices between contested alternatives with finite resources, infinite demand and regular elections.
This can't be delegated away from politics. Those to whom it is delegated become themselves part of the political process.
Long term infrastructure involves many of the hardest and most contested choices both in terms of general policy (nuclear or wind or tides; rail or road or 3rd runway) and raw politics (where to build 2 million houses).
I agree on the substance of this, it will of course remain a politically contested area as indeed it should, but I think there are institutional arrangements that can leave the politicians to set the direction but not meddle day to day and allow for a longer term focus to dictate these decisions. HS2 - which I think is a fundamentally sound idea - has become the poster child for how not to manage these projects. We are in danger of becoming a country where major infrastructure development becomes impossible - and that really is not a country that any of us should want to live in.
Arrangements to put matters "beyond politics" are just as dangerous as the politics.
Triple Lock, anyone?
Many of the UK voting public saw the EU as an arrangement which placed lots of things beyond UK politics, including vast amounts of legislation, transferring them to bodies which were not directly elected. I think we were a bit split as to whether this was a Good Thing or not, as we still are.
There are suggestions that the migration/refugee issue could blow open again a few of those issues for the EU.
Quite a good piece on that in the Guardian.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/22/migration-eu-diplomat-josep-borrell-ukraine-china ...In recent days Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who came to power on the back of controversial rhetoric about the rise of migration, said she would not allow her country to become “Europe’s refugee camp” after 11,000 people arrived on the island of Lampedusa in a matter of days.
Borrell said nationalism was on the rise in Europe but this was more about migration than Euroscepticism. “Brexit actually was feared to be an epidemic. And it has not been,” he said. “It has been a vaccine. No one wants to follow the British leaving the European Union.
“Migration is a bigger divide for the European Union. And it could be a dissolving force for the European Union.” Despite establishing a shared common external border, “we have not been able until now to agree on a common migration policy”, he said.
He attributed this to deep cultural and political differences inside the EU: “There are some members of the European Union that are Japanese-style – we don’t want to mix. We don’t want migrants. We don’t want to accept people from outside. We want our purity.”
He said other countries, such as Spain, have a long history of accepting migrants. “The paradox is that Europe needs migrants because we have so low demographic growth. If we want to survive from a labour point of view, we need migrants.”..
Essentially one bloke turns up and starts saying to councils if they invest in his solar farms they'll get good ROI. To begin with, maybe this is legit, but he ends up taking half a billion from Thurrock Council and just wandering off with it? Shows the length local authorities are going to to try and keep up with government cuts, and the kind of sharks out there preying on them.
I watched a Panorama on that - an individual Tory councillor seems to blame, and Thurrock council will be making cuts for years to pay for it
I think this is always a (minor, but significant) risk with the way our local government works.
About private schools: it's much, much easier to just pick a private school than to move house.
Just because you can still see an avenue towards inequality or opportunity doesn't mean the avenue is as wide and accessible than the other one.
Good policy doesn't always have to be watertight
School policy is basically a canard in my opinion.
The thing in common that all of my Oxbridge pals had? Not wealth, education or class.
But a relatively stable family life and lots of books at home.
So private schools are a waste of money and nobody will object to banning them then...
If we banned things that are a waste of money there wouldn't be much of the economy left.
Clearly the argument for banning private schools isn't about their ineffectiveness. My response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd. Trying to imply that family class, wealth and education aren't main drivers is really quite silly.
And it's such a cakeist argument. You want this thing to be available because it IS beneficial for those who can get in, not because it's some abstract but useless freedom.
And to add some facts on the 1951 Convention Debate -
In 2021 there were 415 asylum applications lodged where sexual orientation formed part of the basis for the claim. 415.
In the speech she claims to want to make a distinction between "discrimination" and "persecution". Presumably then she will be happy to make clear that if your sex or sexual orientation renders you liable to be killed, that amounts to persecution. And therefore entitles you to protection. Or will she be saying that persecution is being killed but discrimination is merely being unable to work and leave the house and, hey, that's too bad but you'll have to suck it up.
She might also like to explain where on this sliding scale discrimination turns into persecution and how it is to be assessed. And I do hope that in doing this she will look in to some obvious historical and contemporary parallels so that, in that phrase always tripping off Ministers' tongues, we can be confident that "lessons have been learnt".
Braverman is on a daily audition for the Tory leadership . She’ll stick the knife into Sunak next year when she can play the martyr and position herself as the true voice of the membership .
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
It's fairly regularly debated. I think ?
The consensus seems to be that some modification would be good, but the chances of achieving any consensus on what that should be are virtually zero. And what we have is a great deal better than nothing.
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
Joys of the English language.
Torpenhow Hill is better than that one, it literally means "hill hill hill hill".
Torpenhow is well worth a visit for its small but magnificent, atmospheric and ancient parish church; some 12th century carvings in beautiful condition. It's on the northern borders of the Lake District National Park.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
With respect, cyclefree, you make a strong argument for humanitarian intervention. Direct a modicum of your anger at Biden for the stupid withdrawal from Afghanistan.
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
I know that Parisian waiters have a reputation for being surly, but nobody faces persecution due to being unable to order a coffee.
Yes, a lot of people would rather be in the UK but France, but that isn't justification to come here.
The right to refuge isn't dependent on you stopping in the first safe country you can get to. This is a good thing, as a refugee crisis often causes serious problems for the country immediately adjacent to it whereas smaller numbers in a more distant country will tend to be less harmful or outright beneficial, so it's helpful if people who can keep moving do keep moving. Also if refugees go to places where they speak the language and/or have connections then this is better all around, as they'll need less support and find it easier to contribute.
There's a lot wrong with the way refugee treaties work but if they were changed to require you to settle in the nearest country where you were out of danger then it would be much worse than it is.
Fit and healthy young men with a fist full of Euros get to reach the country of their choice. Those most in need have to stay in the nearest camp.
On EV cars we can argue the toss about price differentials, government policy, commercial factors. The market will sort it out with or without the government.
What people are missing is that the announcement was made to send a message that a Conservative government won't force you to pay thousands upon thousands of pounds on the whim of some green edict or other.
That is the clear blue water, or they hope it will be, between the parties.
It is just about all they have but is close to peoples' lives so it might just help if not work.
Nah, they just force you to pay thousands upon thousands of pounds on the whim of their mad party base electing a moron who crashed the economy.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
It is a myth that compulsory purchases are the root of the insane extra costs of infrastructure in the UK versus France or Italy. For example these costs are around £3 bn for HS2, not £300 bn. The primary problem is the structure of cost plus contracts which effectively gives an open door for limitless cost over runs at no risk to the contractors. The revolving door between contractors and the delivery authority ensures that this cosy situation remains unchallenged. The lack of strategy in overall infrastructure design means delivery teams are dispersed at the end of each project and any in house expertise is lost.
In short because the Tories flamed the civil service, the government ministries must rely on expensive consultants who may not be any more than so-so.
It doesn't help that capital maintenance projects are the first thing that get cut since they are treated as an expense not as an essential part of avoiding long term asset degradation.
So the problem is fundamental and it is one the Tories themselves created.
Cost plus contracting is asking to be ripped off. Particularly when ministers constantly interfere to change plans.
Heseltine, whom we were discussing yesterday, tried to do away with it at the MoD.
Ministers of all stripes love to rail against 'government waste' but honestly, it's ministerial interference, the pushing and inevitable dropping of pet projects and so on that cause a lot of that waste.
Heseltine was actually pretty effective in managing departments. He had plenty of faults, but was head and shoulders above any of the current Tory ministers. And most of their likely Labour replacements.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Driffield is a pleasant enough market town. Mostly surrounded by agri-business.
As it lies at the headwaters of the River Hull, the world's most northerly chalk stream, the effluent from parliament will not be welcome.
If you really want to wind up the NIMBYs, suggest Beverley.
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
I know that Parisian waiters have a reputation for being surly, but nobody faces persecution due to being unable to order a coffee.
Yes, a lot of people would rather be in the UK but France, but that isn't justification to come here.
If you were fleeing a dangerous regime and wanted to start a new life from scratch, you'd probably want to go somewhere you could speak the language.
Of course you'd want to. Doesn't give you the right to.
On EV cars we can argue the toss about price differentials, government policy, commercial factors. The market will sort it out with or without the government.
What people are missing is that the announcement was made to send a message that a Conservative government won't force you to pay thousands upon thousands of pounds on the whim of some green edict or other.
That is the clear blue water, or they hope it will be, between the parties.
It is just about all they have but is close to peoples' lives so it might just help if not work.
Nobody was forcing anyone to pay thousands of pounds. Sunak has been widely mocked for his list of things he was cancelling which only ever existed on a policy proposal drawn up by his own government.
As for the cost of EVs, the market doesn't give a fuck what the Tories say or think. As Nissan have confirmed, the date is 2030. Because they are now all in a race to survive the battle with SAIC, GWM etc flooding the market. They need to be first if they are to still be here in 2040.
For a politically astute kind of guy you are going out of your way to miss the point.
The Cons are signalling to people that they aren't going in for "all this green nonsense" which is virtue signalling and costing hard working families a fortune.
They are appealing to those drivers who drag the Just Stop Oil protesters by the hair out of the way of the traffic.
Are they? Who put the "green nonsense" on the statute books in the first place? And beyond the Tory core vote, the "green nonsense" is well supported.
What the public see is a government at war with itself, arguing about policies it only just brought in, pledging to stop thing they just did.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
If you have a spare £3k to put a deposit down on a car, are you really "skint"?
The times in my life when I would say I was "skint" I didn't have any money at all. One time, I lived a week on two cakes I got from a bargain bin for 10p because that's all I had. Two cakes and tap water. That's skint.
Surely skintness is in no small part a function of income vs expenditure. I left home in 2008 with about £300 in the bank - I was earning £200 a week before tax, probably £160 after. I was in lodgings costing £80 a week, spent about £40 a week on fuel to get to work, probably another £20 on food. I felt sufficiently affluent that I lent another lad on the shop floor £100 to cover his rent in the first couple of months (much to everyone's amazement I got it back too!).
If I was down to my last £300 now, I'd be in a state of panic, desperately trying to round up extra funds from somewhere. That's not irrational - just filling the tank on my car is £100, the council tax on my house is £160 a month, the utilities another £150...
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
My feeling is that, as I have expressed on here before, rather than giving unlimited people the right to claim asylum, countries should be able to set a numerical limit for the number of people they let into a country every year - and decide for themselves what the mix is - people with skills, family ties, fleeing persecution etc. So if we want to let in a million Ukrainians rather than a million Iranians we can. But we will have to accept that we will be excluding people who are being persecuted simply because we cannot and do not want to welcome everyone. But let's not pretend that those we exclude are not being persecuted and treated appallingly and will likely suffer and die because of the limits we place.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
You point out that Fiji have beaten England recently in a warm up whilst England were doing fitness cycles to prep for the WC but not that Wales could be considered to have been lucky to beat Fiji due to a lot of terrible reffing decisions in the match.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
I accept your points regarding recent playing record - but this does not get away from fact that England have two tough matches to play compared to Wales one to reach SF (Wales have already qualified and can lose to Georgia without changing anything).
Mr. 679, the public doesn't subsidise private schools. The parents of children at private schools subsidise the state sector.
By your rationale, why should atheists be forced to subsidise religions?
The parents of private schools do not subsidise the state - children at private schools get access to privileged education on the basis of being able to pay for it. That the tax payer doesn't have to pay for the education of those children does not matter - because it creates a two tier education system that allows rich people to opt out of the social contract that all children being educated matters. If private schools didn't exist, for example, it would create an incentive for the richest and most privileged to care about public education because it would effect their kids. It would also, hopefully, end the system of privileged patronage that governs this country - that Eton boys run everything because they always have and all know each other.
Labour's plans to tax them a bit more is a sticking plaster - end all non state schooling.
If private education didn't exist it would just mean that wealthy individuals would (even more than already happens) buy homes in catchment areas of good schools, then get their kids educated by the state in those schools.
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
How many times? "The hoi polloi" has a redundant "the". "hoi polloi" means "the many". You are banished to ConHome for the next two hours.
I bet the Eton boys wouldn't have made that error.....
It's only an "error" if you have no clue how languages work.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
If you have a spare £3k to put a deposit down on a car, are you really "skint"?
The times in my life when I would say I was "skint" I didn't have any money at all. One time, I lived a week on two cakes I got from a bargain bin for 10p because that's all I had. Two cakes and tap water. That's skint.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
They won't be outlawed. And manufacturers will continue to make budget cars with petrol engines - they just won't sell them in Europe. That process is already happening and will not be stopped by Rishi faffing with dates.
Nissan will not be an outlier in being EV only by 2030 - I expect that almost everyone will. The UK is one of few RHD markets so even if there is a need to build ICE vehicles for LHD we're an additional cost.
Your £13k Picanto simply won't exist. And as it used to cost £7k in recent memory that shouldn't be a surprise. If we are lucky someone will be prepared to sell cars made for RHD markets here - we will get cast off cars designed for India...
Are you counting 2005 as "in recent memory"? In real terms its price has barely budged in the past eighteen years, its gone up a bit post-Covid as have all because of shortages etc in the market for electrics etc, but overall the price has been remarkably stable in real terms.
We'll see what happens.
If there's a real terms £13k EV in 2030 then I'll be delighted and ICE will be dead and buried, good riddance.
If there's not, if only real terms £20k+ vehicles are still available, then we shouldn't be outlawing real terms £13k vehicles.
Again again - they aren't being outlawed. They will still be made in large numbers. They just won't be made *for Europe*. Kia build various cars that never come here. Other brands like Mitsubishi and Proton have exited completely but still make a lot of vehicles.
So in 2030 the Tories propose that it will still be legal to sell cars that don't have a PHEV system. Great - who will still be making them? None of the mainstream manufacturers will be pushing the old technology - they are already resolutely on track to go fully EV (e.g Nissan, Volvo, MINI etc) as a matter of corporate survival against the chinese onslaught.
You might see someone like Dacia - or new old brands recreated like Dacia. Still churning out low volume vehicles in the old tech. But at higher cost - lower numbers, lack of feed through of hand-me-down components. And we are RHD.
If you want cheap then you're looking at the likes of Proton and Tata. Selling you budget cars built for 2nd world economies. Which is OK because thats how Kia started. But none of the big brands. ICE is dead whether the Tories like it or not.
Good.
So what's the problem?
If Tata are eight grand cheaper than the cheapest EV they should be allowed to sell their product here.
If EV are the cheapest, then there's no rational reason to buy an ICE and nobody will.
I'd love to see only ICE cars being on the road, and if the technology is there then great, if its not then it will be just a few years later, but either way its technology and scale that matters more than laws and edicts so what's your problem?
There is no problem. The last time Tata tried to sell a car here it was laughed at (the cityRover). People do not want to buy these cars.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
My feeling is that, as I have expressed on here before, rather than giving unlimited people the right to claim asylum, countries should be able to set a numerical limit for the number of people they let into a country every year - and decide for themselves what the mix is - people with skills, family ties, fleeing persecution etc. So if we want to let in a million Ukrainians rather than a million Iranians we can. But we will have to accept that we will be excluding people who are being persecuted simply because we cannot and do not want to welcome everyone. But let's not pretend that those we exclude are not being persecuted and treated appallingly and will likely suffer and die because of the limits we place.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
Thanks. This is an honest approach! And it accepts the unspoken reality that culture, proximity and economic parity are big factors in the acceptability of refugee migration in the west.
Agreeing there are no easy solutions, your solution has to describe the process by which, with the Guardian and the BBC looking on, the UK returns surplus refuge seekers back to be hanged in Iran or North Korea, imprisoned in Uganda, etc etc.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Probably an old RAF WW2 bomber base or two they can repurpose.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Apparently being able to buy a new car for 13 grand (real terms) is now a human right.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
You point out that Fiji have beaten England recently in a warm up whilst England were doing fitness cycles to prep for the WC but not that Wales could be considered to have been lucky to beat Fiji due to a lot of terrible reffing decisions in the match.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
I accept your points regarding recent playing record - but this does not get away from fact that England have two tough matches to play compared to Wales one to reach SF (Wales have already qualified and can lose to Georgia without changing anything).
Surely by your calculations though Samoa is not a difficult game, Samoa lost to Argentina who apparently haven’t impressed, and according to a lot of commentary after England beat them they are crap, so England have to play a team that is worse than and lost to a team that hasn’t impressed and who were given a beating by England.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
One to keep and eye on: Suella making a speech about the Refugee Convention.
This could get very confused between: pragmatic reality, grandstanding, the press - both left and right, electioneering, lobbyists and extremists.
FWIW I think there are a few uncomfortable realities.
1) Status quo is unsustainable. 2) Western opinion does not regard all refugees as the same, and this won't change. No politician can say this. 3) About 2 billion people would have the right to refugee status given the desire and the chance. 4) Being a refugee is a complete lottery/obstacle course. At one end you spend 40 years in a tent in a desert. At the other end you are housed in the most expensive city in the world and you children have every chance of going to Oxford. 5) The real problem is the quality of governance in the countries being fled from.
I agree with Suella (this is rare) that the Convention has to change, or else the UK has to go independent of it. A number of EU countries plainly think the same. The problem is what to replace it with.
6) Nobody needs to flee from France to come to the UK.
This is what vexes the public.
I disagree. There may be individuals who speak English and not French and being in England is safer for them for that reason. There may be people from certain countries where communities already exist in England and don't in France. And, in terms of per capita refugee figures (last figures I can find are from 2015 tbf), France takes in just over twice the number of refugees the UK does.
I know that Parisian waiters have a reputation for being surly, but nobody faces persecution due to being unable to order a coffee.
Yes, a lot of people would rather be in the UK but France, but that isn't justification to come here.
If you were fleeing a dangerous regime and wanted to start a new life from scratch, you'd probably want to go somewhere you could speak the language.
Of course you'd want to. Doesn't give you the right to.
I didn't say it did. You were the one calling for 'justification' – I just gave you some. As usual your misanthropy gets the better of you.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
They won't be outlawed. And manufacturers will continue to make budget cars with petrol engines - they just won't sell them in Europe. That process is already happening and will not be stopped by Rishi faffing with dates.
Nissan will not be an outlier in being EV only by 2030 - I expect that almost everyone will. The UK is one of few RHD markets so even if there is a need to build ICE vehicles for LHD we're an additional cost.
Your £13k Picanto simply won't exist. And as it used to cost £7k in recent memory that shouldn't be a surprise. If we are lucky someone will be prepared to sell cars made for RHD markets here - we will get cast off cars designed for India...
Are you counting 2005 as "in recent memory"? In real terms its price has barely budged in the past eighteen years, its gone up a bit post-Covid as have all because of shortages etc in the market for electrics etc, but overall the price has been remarkably stable in real terms.
We'll see what happens.
If there's a real terms £13k EV in 2030 then I'll be delighted and ICE will be dead and buried, good riddance.
If there's not, if only real terms £20k+ vehicles are still available, then we shouldn't be outlawing real terms £13k vehicles.
Again again - they aren't being outlawed. They will still be made in large numbers. They just won't be made *for Europe*. Kia build various cars that never come here. Other brands like Mitsubishi and Proton have exited completely but still make a lot of vehicles.
So in 2030 the Tories propose that it will still be legal to sell cars that don't have a PHEV system. Great - who will still be making them? None of the mainstream manufacturers will be pushing the old technology - they are already resolutely on track to go fully EV (e.g Nissan, Volvo, MINI etc) as a matter of corporate survival against the chinese onslaught.
You might see someone like Dacia - or new old brands recreated like Dacia. Still churning out low volume vehicles in the old tech. But at higher cost - lower numbers, lack of feed through of hand-me-down components. And we are RHD.
If you want cheap then you're looking at the likes of Proton and Tata. Selling you budget cars built for 2nd world economies. Which is OK because thats how Kia started. But none of the big brands. ICE is dead whether the Tories like it or not.
Good.
So what's the problem?
If Tata are eight grand cheaper than the cheapest EV they should be allowed to sell their product here.
If EV are the cheapest, then there's no rational reason to buy an ICE and nobody will.
I'd love to see only ICE cars being on the road, and if the technology is there then great, if its not then it will be just a few years later, but either way its technology and scale that matters more than laws and edicts so what's your problem?
There is no problem. The last time Tata tried to sell a car here it was laughed at (the cityRover). People do not want to buy these cars.
Whereas people do buy Dacia and Kia and all sorts of other cars currently at the £13k pricemark.
Want conclusive proof that EV will be conquering by 2030 due to market conditions? Lets here confirmation from each of those manufacturers who are selling vehicles at the £13k price point, like Dacia, like Kia etc
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people get around, even outside of London.
40% of households in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
From today's Guardian: Do other countries do it cheaper? Apparently so. France’s latest 203-mile (327km) stretch of high-speed track to be constructed from Bordeaux across the country’s south – just under double the length of London-Birmingham – is expected to come in at €14bn (£12.1bn). A UK government-commissioned study from 2018 found high-speed rail internationally was generally achieved for about £32m a kilometre, on a range of £11m-£79m a kilometre. Phase one of HS2 looks like coming in at about £250m/km.
That is really quite astounding. I don't understand why we didn't just get the French (or the Chinese) to build it. Or at least not been so terrified of the Cotswolds Nimbys that we put half of it in unnecessary tunnels.
Well leaving aside that its the Chilterns not the Cotswolds, the tunnels are mostly needed because the gradients of the railway require them. Again, and just to repeat, it is not the engineering nor the compulsory purchase that is costing the money, it is the utter incompetence of the delivery.
The Conservative evisceration of the public sector has brought us to the point where the UK can not function as an efficient state provider. If this bothers you, then do not vote Tory at the next general election... or... you know... ever.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
My feeling is that, as I have expressed on here before, rather than giving unlimited people the right to claim asylum, countries should be able to set a numerical limit for the number of people they let into a country every year - and decide for themselves what the mix is - people with skills, family ties, fleeing persecution etc. So if we want to let in a million Ukrainians rather than a million Iranians we can. But we will have to accept that we will be excluding people who are being persecuted simply because we cannot and do not want to welcome everyone. But let's not pretend that those we exclude are not being persecuted and treated appallingly and will likely suffer and die because of the limits we place.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
I mean if the government openly said "we don't want to let x group in because we're bigots" I'd be happy with that to a degree - I also worry it would be considered a legitimise bigotry towards that group. You also get to a point where if all of Europe says "no brown people" then we still have a refugee crisis with millions of people with nowhere to go and we still end up where we currently are.
The important thing about centring the rights of the refugee over any state is that their desires should and do matter. It is not their fault where they were born, and it is typically not their fault they are persecuted or live in a war zone. That shouldn't mean that they lose even more autonomy over their life by not having a say in where they go. Maybe we should have more collective zones where people can apply for sanctuary, but again that would require global cooperation and an acceptance of some refugees. Allowing people to maybe go "I would prefer to go to one of these three countries" and then that gets distributed based on how many different countries have taken in.
Or maybe the borders of nation states are bad and demand militarisation and policing and brutality and we should end the border regime and say yes, actually, free movement of all people is something that has existed throughout most of human history and was not in and of itself a cause for the end of the world and we would actually be able to manage thousands of more people in this country if the state just did what it was supposed to do and functioned rather than being an asset selling vehicle for private capital.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people live, even outside of London.
40% of people in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
And 93% of those living in the North West don't live in Liverpool.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
I see a lot of whining on LBC about Labours plan to remove charitable status from private schools .
Why should the public be expected to subsidize these ?
Even if we were to accept the premise of your question (zero rating for VAT is not a subsidy), the answer would be 'because the parents are already paying for the state provision of education and deciding not to use it'.
In these conversations it quickly becomes apparent how much people with kids at private school resent paying taxes to finance state education. Then we wonder why a government composed of (and from a party financed by) people who mostly send their kids to private school won't fund state education properly.
Politics of envy much? You are absolutely projecting.
I've never understood the mentality of obviously articulate people, who have evidently done well in life, carrying such a chip on their shoulder.
Look down thread or indeed any time this topic comes up, you immediately get the private school contingent moaning how unfair it is that they have to pay taxes to fund state education. The other day we had a Tory supporter on here saying nobody with kids at state schools would be voting Tory - he's right of course but why is that? Because we know the Tories don't use the state system in the main, they view it as a cost that imposes an unfair tax burden on people like them. I have three children in the state sector and see the results of this attitude daily, in terms of stretched budgets, difficulties in recruiting teachers and crumbling infrastructure. Parents like me aren't stupid, we can all see what's going on. It is such lazy, elitist, patronising thinking to just go blah blah chip on your shoulder blah blah every time someone points this stuff out.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
Agreed, particularly on the second point.
Which is why Sunak and Braverman were in New York recently with all the other global leaders for the UN's agenda-setting High Level Week.
Oh, what's that? They weren't? They stayed at home?! Ah.
What's the point of making a giant eye-catching announcement that will require global co-operation without being willing to co-operate globally? Why go to the US to do it now when the people who mattered were there a week ago?
Whereas people do buy Dacia and Kia and all sorts of other cars currently at the £13k pricemark.
They don't in meaningful volumes and they never trouble the top 10 monthly sellers. So the availability of 13 grand shitboxes is irrelevant when formulating transport and environmental policy because not many people buy them.
An accomplished musician as well. Made a small but significant contribution to hip-hop with his track The Edge* being sampled widely, most famously sampled by Dr Dre on The Next Episode.
*in a matryoshka of musical nuggets, this was produced by the deeply influential David Axelrod.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people live, even outside of London.
40% of people in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
And 93% of those living in the North West don't live in Liverpool.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
Whereas people do buy Dacia and Kia and all sorts of other cars currently at the £13k pricemark.
They don't in meaningful volumes and they never trouble the top 10 monthly sellers. So the availability of 13 grand shitboxes is irrelevant when formulating transport and environmental policy because not many people buy them.
By that attitude lets stop building cycling paths because even fewer people use them.
Snobby attitudes of those who can afford or want bigger vehicles may think that £13k cars are irrelevant, but to those who buy them (either used or proportionately cheaper second hand) they're absolutely not irrelevant.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people live, even outside of London.
40% of people in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
And 93% of those living in the North West don't live in Liverpool.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
You should take your own advice.
Of course, we Northerners drive
I'm missing the word all in that sentence, can you highlight it?
On average that's absolutely and categorically true, I never said all. You inserted the claim of all, not me.
The English region with the highest rate of not owning a car is (obviously) London.
In second place it's the North East. In 4th it's the North West, and in 5th it's Yorkshire.
Well leaving aside that its the Chilterns not the Cotswolds, the tunnels are mostly needed because the gradients of the railway require them. Again, and just to repeat, it is not the engineering nor the compulsory purchase that is costing the money, it is the utter incompetence of the delivery.
The Conservative evisceration of the public sector has brought us to the point where the UK can not function as an efficient state provider. If this bothers you, then do not vote Tory at the next general election... or... you know... ever.
Public spending now accounts for 45% of GDP. Whatever is responsible for the civil service being utterly crap, being 'eviscerated' by some mythical neoliberal Tory Party is certainly not it.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people live, even outside of London.
40% of people in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
And 93% of those living in the North West don't live in Liverpool.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
Liverpudlians matter too.
There's a reason it's "You'll never walk alone"
And by your own maths 60% of Liverpudlians have access to a car.
So even Liverpool, which is the extreme, the majority not the plurality meet what I said.
I'm from Merseyside myself. Certainly never seen a shortage of vehicles driving around roads Liverpool, or surrounding areas like Birkenhead, or Widnes or Runcorn.
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
My feeling is that, as I have expressed on here before, rather than giving unlimited people the right to claim asylum, countries should be able to set a numerical limit for the number of people they let into a country every year - and decide for themselves what the mix is - people with skills, family ties, fleeing persecution etc. So if we want to let in a million Ukrainians rather than a million Iranians we can. But we will have to accept that we will be excluding people who are being persecuted simply because we cannot and do not want to welcome everyone. But let's not pretend that those we exclude are not being persecuted and treated appallingly and will likely suffer and die because of the limits we place.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
Thanks. This is an honest approach! And it accepts the unspoken reality that culture, proximity and economic parity are big factors in the acceptability of refugee migration in the west.
Agreeing there are no easy solutions, your solution has to describe the process by which, with the Guardian and the BBC looking on, the UK returns surplus refuge seekers back to be hanged in Iran or North Korea, imprisoned in Uganda, etc etc.
I don't have an easy answer or any answer at the moment. And I do need to do some work so will check in later.
The case for revisiting Conventions from 1951 and updating them is in theory a good one. I am not at all certain that the U.K. is best placed to do this. Because it takes far fewer asylum seekers than other countries in Europe let alone those poorer countries bordering many of the places from which people are fleeing. The Tories are making out that the U.K. is somehow a victim of hordes of illegals. But in reality it is a victim of its own incompetence in dealing with asylum seekers and taking other steps (described on here by @rcs1000 multiple times) to deal with the black economy.
To be heard on difficult topics people need to believe in your good faith. As I said yesterday in my header on another topic, I have serious doubts about whether people - other countries without which no international agreement is possible - are willing to listen to the U.K. or believe in its good faith.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
The fact of the matter is that the asylum seeker issue is not about asylum seekers - it is about the neoliberal state. The neoliberal state has taken away services that were built in the post war consensus that gave the poorest amongst us the ability to have social mobility, prosperity and security.
As that wealth was built up by state investment and for the common good, people benefited. In the last 30-40 years that public wealth that was accumulated was flogged off, and we were told the wealth would trickle down and that we'd be better off. I would content that most people now feel more precarity then people 30 years ago and, even if materially their standard of living is on average is better, the feeling of precarity is higher. So with more people feeling that public services have receded from them; that the NHS, public housing, social services, education are all failing them governments have to present an answer why. They can't just admit it's because their policies are the equivalent of selling off the family silver to their mates, so they have to say "foreigners are using up more resources that we could otherwise give to you".
That asylum seekers have the right to claim asylum is a right poor people in the UK and across the west mostly don't need (right now), and so they resent it. If the state actually provided services, I don't think they would resent it nearly as much.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Apparently being able to buy a new car for 13 grand (real terms) is now a human right.
I see little reason to ban it, human right or not.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
A new car loses something like a third of its value as soon as you drive it off the forecourt, doesn't it? That seems like a luxury that people on a budget can't afford. New cars are just a status symbol, it's never even crossed my mind to buy one.
It depends though. Yes a car loses value when you drive it off, but also used cars need MOTs and repairs etc
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
The two cars I've bought in this country were both 2yrs old diesels. The first we kept for 8 years and only got rid of it because it wasn't ULEZ compliant. IIRC we sold it for about half of what we paid for it as a part exchange for its replacement so the cost in terms of depreciation must have been about £1k per year. Both cars have been extremely reliable and servicing/maintenance costs have been negligible. Buying the same cars new would have been about 50% more expensive I think in cash terms and the depreciation over those first two years would have been significant.
This is where the PB bias of older, richer people is really evident. And claims that "we northerners are drivers" is contrary to how many people live, even outside of London.
40% of people in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
And 93% of those living in the North West don't live in Liverpool.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
Liverpudlians matter too.
There's a reason it's "You'll never walk alone"
I'd always assumed that was due to high street-crime rates on Merseyside
"Fearing discrimination on the basis of being gay or a woman should not by itself be enough to qualify for protection under international refugee laws,".
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
There are no easy answers. So there are only difficult answers. The difficult answers cannot bypass difficult issues. Top of the list currently bypassed:
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
My feeling is that, as I have expressed on here before, rather than giving unlimited people the right to claim asylum, countries should be able to set a numerical limit for the number of people they let into a country every year - and decide for themselves what the mix is - people with skills, family ties, fleeing persecution etc. So if we want to let in a million Ukrainians rather than a million Iranians we can. But we will have to accept that we will be excluding people who are being persecuted simply because we cannot and do not want to welcome everyone. But let's not pretend that those we exclude are not being persecuted and treated appallingly and will likely suffer and die because of the limits we place.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
Thanks. This is an honest approach! And it accepts the unspoken reality that culture, proximity and economic parity are big factors in the acceptability of refugee migration in the west.
Agreeing there are no easy solutions, your solution has to describe the process by which, with the Guardian and the BBC looking on, the UK returns surplus refuge seekers back to be hanged in Iran or North Korea, imprisoned in Uganda, etc etc.
The vast majority of refugees are in bordering countries to the places people are fleeing from, so if you were designing a system where developed countries helped as many or more people as they do now but with less of the Hunger Games then you have to start by thinking about what works for those countries. For the sake of argument, if you'd managed to do that (which Cyclefree hasn't described but it might be possible), you might be able to deport people who weren't selected by your new System of Wonderful Humanity, Justice and Practicality to those countries.
But obviously this is hard to do, and it's even harder if everyone can see that the goal of the developed countries that want to change the system is to take in less refugees rather than to fix the Hunger Games.
From today's Guardian: Do other countries do it cheaper? Apparently so. France’s latest 203-mile (327km) stretch of high-speed track to be constructed from Bordeaux across the country’s south – just under double the length of London-Birmingham – is expected to come in at €14bn (£12.1bn). A UK government-commissioned study from 2018 found high-speed rail internationally was generally achieved for about £32m a kilometre, on a range of £11m-£79m a kilometre. Phase one of HS2 looks like coming in at about £250m/km.
That is really quite astounding. I don't understand why we didn't just get the French (or the Chinese) to build it. Or at least not been so terrified of the Cotswolds Nimbys that we put half of it in unnecessary tunnels.
Well leaving aside that its the Chilterns not the Cotswolds, the tunnels are mostly needed because the gradients of the railway require them. Again, and just to repeat, it is not the engineering nor the compulsory purchase that is costing the money, it is the utter incompetence of the delivery.
The Conservative evisceration of the public sector has brought us to the point where the UK can not function as an efficient state provider. If this bothers you, then do not vote Tory at the next general election... or... you know... ever.
Public infrastructure projects being delayed and going over budget is a trend across Western Europe. Look at Stuttgart 21 or the new Berlin Brandenburg airport.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
So building on Picanto maths we need to take that £13.7k base and apply 7 years of inflation. A simple pro-rata of 17 years of inflation into 7 gives 25% for inflation in 2030 - not allowing for inflation being higher now. That gets us to £17,081 as a base point.
Then we have development costs. As we've been discussing we are a small market thanks to RHD and a long way from the rest of RHD. So costs likely to go up more.
A base price of £20k for a petrol "cheap" car in 2030 doesn't feel unlikely. A car which will cost a lot to run (petrol, VED, maintenance) vs the EV options - of which there will be many). EV prices are dropping and choices increasing.
So by 2030 we will have EVs cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. Yet we are told by the Tories that we must keep going with outdated ICE cars built expensively in small numbers because that will be "cheaper".
About private schools: it's much, much easier to just pick a private school than to move house.
Just because you can still see an avenue towards inequality or opportunity doesn't mean the avenue is as wide and accessible than the other one.
Good policy doesn't always have to be watertight
School policy is basically a canard in my opinion.
The thing in common that all of my Oxbridge pals had? Not wealth, education or class.
But a relatively stable family life and lots of books at home.
So private schools are a waste of money and nobody will object to banning them then...
If we banned things that are a waste of money there wouldn't be much of the economy left.
Clearly the argument for banning private schools isn't about their ineffectiveness. My response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd. Trying to imply that family class, wealth and education aren't main drivers is really quite silly.
And it's such a cakeist argument. You want this thing to be available because it IS beneficial for those who can get in, not because it's some abstract but useless freedom.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
From today's Guardian: Do other countries do it cheaper? Apparently so. France’s latest 203-mile (327km) stretch of high-speed track to be constructed from Bordeaux across the country’s south – just under double the length of London-Birmingham – is expected to come in at €14bn (£12.1bn). A UK government-commissioned study from 2018 found high-speed rail internationally was generally achieved for about £32m a kilometre, on a range of £11m-£79m a kilometre. Phase one of HS2 looks like coming in at about £250m/km.
That is really quite astounding. I don't understand why we didn't just get the French (or the Chinese) to build it. Or at least not been so terrified of the Cotswolds Nimbys that we put half of it in unnecessary tunnels.
Well leaving aside that its the Chilterns not the Cotswolds, the tunnels are mostly needed because the gradients of the railway require them. Again, and just to repeat, it is not the engineering nor the compulsory purchase that is costing the money, it is the utter incompetence of the delivery.
The Conservative evisceration of the public sector has brought us to the point where the UK can not function as an efficient state provider. If this bothers you, then do not vote Tory at the next general election... or... you know... ever.
And the Chiltern tunnel was originally to have been be built using the reasonably-cheap cut & cover technique. It wasn't going to have been much more expensive per km than building any of the cuttings and viaducts needed along most of the rest of the line.
Instead, yet another last-minute change to the spec has meant that we're now boring a deep tunnel and plating it in gold. And now that it's 82% complete, Sunak has just set the business case that justified it on fire. Agh!
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
Why is it ignorant? A high percentage of people in this country don't own a car, and the main reason for that is because they can't afford one, not because they don't want one.
Comments
The idea that they'll suddenly end up rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi either way isn't going to happen. Already today good schools inflate the value of houses in their catchment area.
Frankly, your idealistic positions sound like those of the 14 year olds I used to debate at school.
At mine, our lockers and sports hall were from when the school was built, i.e. the 1960s.
I went back to visit 6 years ago. The lockers and sports hall was the same.
Meanwhile all the comps around here seem to get basically rebuilt ever 15 years...
There's a lot wrong with the way refugee treaties work but if they were changed to require you to settle in the nearest country where you were out of danger then it would be much worse than it is.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66919416
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
Less of an issue perhaps now than it was then, but the repair bills for my Seat were getting so silly, that buying a new Picanto ended up costing me very little comparably. And I was quite happy to do so and able to do so on my budget. The Picanto was also an upgrade as it was all-round better and it was a five door hatch not a three door hatch which I had previously. Plus as I said, bigger cars at the time would cost more, even used, than that cost new.
How we budget is up to us as individuals, but there's nothing wrong with people budgeting for new at entry level rather than used which can cost more.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
I hesitate to make an obvious substitution for the word "gay" or "woman".
But a reminder of what being "gay" or a "woman" can mean in the countries from which people flee.
In Iran women are beaten in the streets, shot at - with the Iranian police deliberately aiming for their eyes, raped in prison and murdered by the security services.
Gay men are hung in public from cranes. They can also be required to have trans surgery - if they want to live - though they will not of course be able to live as gay men.
In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from leaving the house without a male guardian, they cannot go to parks or take exercise or have any sort of education at all. Young girls are forced to marry men much older than themselves, raped and if they need care during pregnancy and childbirth cannot have a male doctor attend them. As women are not entitled to education, pretty soon, they will not get any sort of medical care. If they "dishonour" the family, they can be stoned to death - a hideous and prolonged death. There have also been credible reports of women being beheaded by the Taliban. If they go out and demonstrate against this, you can see films of the Taliban beating them up. They must be completely veiled at all times and are punished if not. They cannot earn a living and if they do not have a male to look after them they starve.
This is not about fearing "discrimination" of the sort that women faced in this country (and still do, despite the laws we have) - a lack of equal pay and so on. This is about being treated as less than human - and to say that people facing this should not be offered protection is revolting.
What sort of protection, by whom and whether we can place some limit on numbers are legitimate questions to debate. There are no easy answers. But pretending that this sort of barbaric behaviour should not afford protection of some type to its victims is just awful.
Just because you can still see an avenue towards inequality or opportunity doesn't mean the avenue is as wide and accessible than the other one.
Good policy doesn't always have to be watertight
https://www.euractiv.com/section/road-transport/news/desperate-foreign-truckers-stage-hunger-strike-in-germany/
Foreign truck drivers who transport goods around Europe have staged a hunger strike in Germany as part of a weeks-long work stoppage, describing it as their “last hope” to draw attention to the exploitation they say they suffer.
1) I doubt if a country where 30% of its babies has a foreign born mother is an especially racist hellhole.
2) With refugees it seems to me that proximity, economic parity, and culture are in fact the biggest questions. The reality is that the UK has absorbed millions of people from abroad since WWII with a reasonable degree of success.
3) The relaxed borders of a former age belong to the time before cheap and rapid mass travel, and a time with a much smaller global population.
Torpenhow Hill is better than that one, it literally means "hill hill hill hill".
The thing in common that all of my Oxbridge pals had? Not wealth, education or class.
But a relatively stable family life and lots of books at home.
The problem with removing cheap new cars from the market is not that people who would have bought new now can't afford cars. It's that everyone is pushed out along the cost curve, running older, dirtier cars, and the poorest either get pushed off the end, or have to run vehicles past their economic design lives and get hit in the wallet for lots of repairs.
Then to go after gay people and women shows how clueless she is . And then her apparent comments about modern slavery when the IMB makes it easier for traffickers as those trafficked lose any government support .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuIb0f46Dvk
The real problem is the quality of government and its political and economic management and use of violence in large parts of the world.
Second: This is a global problem - like climate change. Only the UN and its bodies is remotely competent to organise it justly and fully.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/22/migration-eu-diplomat-josep-borrell-ukraine-china
...In recent days Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who came to power on the back of controversial rhetoric about the rise of migration, said she would not allow her country to become “Europe’s refugee camp” after 11,000 people arrived on the island of Lampedusa in a matter of days.
Borrell said nationalism was on the rise in Europe but this was more about migration than Euroscepticism. “Brexit actually was feared to be an epidemic. And it has not been,” he said. “It has been a vaccine. No one wants to follow the British leaving the European Union.
“Migration is a bigger divide for the European Union. And it could be a dissolving force for the European Union.” Despite establishing a shared common external border, “we have not been able until now to agree on a common migration policy”, he said.
He attributed this to deep cultural and political differences inside the EU: “There are some members of the European Union that are Japanese-style – we don’t want to mix. We don’t want migrants. We don’t want to accept people from outside. We want our purity.”
He said other countries, such as Spain, have a long history of accepting migrants. “The paradox is that Europe needs migrants because we have so low demographic growth. If we want to survive from a labour point of view, we need migrants.”..
Very sorry to hear about your friend by the way.
And it's such a cakeist argument. You want this thing to be available because it IS beneficial for those who can get in, not because it's some abstract but useless freedom.
In 2021 there were 415 asylum applications lodged where sexual orientation formed part of the basis for the claim. 415.
In the speech she claims to want to make a distinction between "discrimination" and "persecution". Presumably then she will be happy to make clear that if your sex or sexual orientation renders you liable to be killed, that amounts to persecution. And therefore entitles you to protection. Or will she be saying that persecution is being killed but discrimination is merely being unable to work and leave the house and, hey, that's too bad but you'll have to suck it up.
She might also like to explain where on this sliding scale discrimination turns into persecution and how it is to be assessed. And I do hope that in doing this she will look in to some obvious historical and contemporary parallels so that, in that phrase always tripping off Ministers' tongues, we can be confident that "lessons have been learnt".
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-deep-absurdity-of-hs2-diversitys-agenda/
The consensus seems to be that some modification would be good, but the chances of achieving any consensus on what that should be are virtually zero.
And what we have is a great deal better than nothing.
He had plenty of faults, but was head and shoulders above any of the current Tory ministers. And most of their likely Labour replacements.
As it lies at the headwaters of the River Hull, the world's most northerly chalk stream, the effluent from parliament will not be welcome.
If you really want to wind up the NIMBYs, suggest Beverley.
RIP Ducky and Illya Kuryakin
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66919863
What the public see is a government at war with itself, arguing about policies it only just brought in, pledging to stop thing they just did.
Also, pineapple on pizza is wrong.
Am I doing this right?
If I was down to my last £300 now, I'd be in a state of panic, desperately trying to round up extra funds from somewhere. That's not irrational - just filling the tank on my car is £100, the council tax on my house is £160 a month, the utilities another £150...
Radiohead only have two decent tracks, Radiohead and Karma Police.
It is not an ideal solution by any means but it is maybe more honest than pretending that being gay or a woman does not lead to awful suffering in many parts of the world and that somehow those who seek to flee this are cheating or exaggerating their suffering, as Ms B seems to be suggesting.
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Agreeing there are no easy solutions, your solution has to describe the process by which, with the Guardian and the BBC looking on, the UK returns surplus refuge seekers back to be hanged in Iran or North Korea, imprisoned in Uganda, etc etc.
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Want conclusive proof that EV will be conquering by 2030 due to market conditions? Lets here confirmation from each of those manufacturers who are selling vehicles at the £13k price point, like Dacia, like Kia etc
Not Nissan whose cheapest model is £21k.
40% of households in Liverpool don't have access to a car at all, let alone a new one.
The Conservative evisceration of the public sector has brought us to the point where the UK can not function as an efficient state provider. If this bothers you, then do not vote Tory at the next general election... or... you know... ever.
The important thing about centring the rights of the refugee over any state is that their desires should and do matter. It is not their fault where they were born, and it is typically not their fault they are persecuted or live in a war zone. That shouldn't mean that they lose even more autonomy over their life by not having a say in where they go. Maybe we should have more collective zones where people can apply for sanctuary, but again that would require global cooperation and an acceptance of some refugees. Allowing people to maybe go "I would prefer to go to one of these three countries" and then that gets distributed based on how many different countries have taken in.
Or maybe the borders of nation states are bad and demand militarisation and policing and brutality and we should end the border regime and say yes, actually, free movement of all people is something that has existed throughout most of human history and was not in and of itself a cause for the end of the world and we would actually be able to manage thousands of more people in this country if the state just did what it was supposed to do and functioned rather than being an asset selling vehicle for private capital.
Driving absolutely is the primary form of transportation for the overwhelming majority of Northerners. There'll always be exceptions to any average though.
Which is why Sunak and Braverman were in New York recently with all the other global leaders for the UN's agenda-setting High Level Week.
Oh, what's that? They weren't? They stayed at home?! Ah.
What's the point of making a giant eye-catching announcement that will require global co-operation without being willing to co-operate globally? Why go to the US to do it now when the people who mattered were there a week ago?
*in a matryoshka of musical nuggets, this was produced by the deeply influential David Axelrod.
There's a reason it's "You'll never walk alone"
Snobby attitudes of those who can afford or want bigger vehicles may think that £13k cars are irrelevant, but to those who buy them (either used or proportionately cheaper second hand) they're absolutely not irrelevant.
So even Liverpool, which is the extreme, the majority not the plurality meet what I said.
I'm from Merseyside myself. Certainly never seen a shortage of vehicles driving around roads Liverpool, or surrounding areas like Birkenhead, or Widnes or Runcorn.
The case for revisiting Conventions from 1951 and updating them is in theory a good one. I am not at all certain that the U.K. is best placed to do this. Because it takes far fewer asylum seekers than other countries in Europe let alone those poorer countries bordering many of the places from which people are fleeing. The Tories are making out that the U.K. is somehow a victim of hordes of illegals. But in reality it is a victim of its own incompetence in dealing with asylum seekers and taking other steps (described on here by @rcs1000 multiple times) to deal with the black economy.
To be heard on difficult topics people need to believe in your good faith. As I said yesterday in my header on another topic, I have serious doubts about whether people - other countries without which no international agreement is possible - are willing to listen to the U.K. or believe in its good faith.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
As that wealth was built up by state investment and for the common good, people benefited. In the last 30-40 years that public wealth that was accumulated was flogged off, and we were told the wealth would trickle down and that we'd be better off. I would content that most people now feel more precarity then people 30 years ago and, even if materially their standard of living is on average is better, the feeling of precarity is higher. So with more people feeling that public services have receded from them; that the NHS, public housing, social services, education are all failing them governments have to present an answer why. They can't just admit it's because their policies are the equivalent of selling off the family silver to their mates, so they have to say "foreigners are using up more resources that we could otherwise give to you".
That asylum seekers have the right to claim asylum is a right poor people in the UK and across the west mostly don't need (right now), and so they resent it. If the state actually provided services, I don't think they would resent it nearly as much.
But obviously this is hard to do, and it's even harder if everyone can see that the goal of the developed countries that want to change the system is to take in less refugees rather than to fix the Hunger Games.
Blaming the Tories is a form of denial.
Then we have development costs. As we've been discussing we are a small market thanks to RHD and a long way from the rest of RHD. So costs likely to go up more.
A base price of £20k for a petrol "cheap" car in 2030 doesn't feel unlikely. A car which will cost a lot to run (petrol, VED, maintenance) vs the EV options - of which there will be many). EV prices are dropping and choices increasing.
So by 2030 we will have EVs cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. Yet we are told by the Tories that we must keep going with outdated ICE cars built expensively in small numbers because that will be "cheaper".
If a disaster ever struck the south of England an awful lot of you will end up stuck in France.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Instead, yet another last-minute change to the spec has meant that we're now boring a deep tunnel and plating it in gold. And now that it's 82% complete, Sunak has just set the business case that justified it on fire. Agh!