In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
If I could make one motoring enforcement change, it is a throwback so ancient it never even gets discussed. I would like to see traffic police active and tackling dangerous tailgaiting, whilst also enforcing lane discipline.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Flawed? You mean the piece backing Fascism?
You think?
I know, right. Up to then it seemed like the kind of good, old fashioned common sense for which the Daily Mail is rightly venerated.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
I hate that "a billion pounds" nonsense. It's nearly as bad as Brown's triple counting where they'd add up each years increase.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
20mph would be a dizzying speed in my experience on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel, but, curiously not to the Bridge. I’ve rarely been delayed on my approach to the Bridge but going North my experience is the opposite.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
The ultimate LTN with extreme parking restrictions: Downing Street.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
20mph would be a dizzying speed in my experience on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel, but, curiously not to the Bridge. I’ve rarely been delayed on my approach to the Bridge but going North my experience is the opposite.
More of a Rotherhithe and Blackwall man myself. Yes the approaches are definitely more stop/start than 20mph but can probably average 20mph over the crossing and a couple of miles either side.
I really think the full efforts of the PM need to be addressed in raising it to 30mph though, otherwise they should not be able to use the flag again.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
To add more grist to the 'someone in government reads PB comments' mill, the planned closure of the Dartford Crossing last night was cancelled at the last minute.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
As I have often pointed out, the root cause of poor NHS productivity is lack of investment in facilities and staff education. The same is true across much of the rest of the economy.
Low growth is due to low productivity is due to low capital investment.
That 7% Reform vote won't be anything like that come election day.
Mostly not going to Keir "second referendum" Starmer.
Nor will the Greens get 7%. At a guess id say Ref will be 3% with most of those remaining votes going to abstention or Tory, and Green will be 3% with the gap split between abstention, Lib Dem and Lab.
It would be an interesting match bet, Green vs Reform % at the next GE. I agree with @carnforth , the Corbynites might well go Green, and they’re probably better organised & more professional than Reform.
I’d have Greens favourite, 1/2 vs 6/4 maybe? I wonder if any bookie will offer it
If Farage became Reform leader that would change things I guess
Farage, a clever prick, will only step up if he sees a gap in the market. The Cons haven’t left much space on the right for him so I daresay he’ll stick to his other grifts for now.
Plus Lozzo is pretty poisonous at the mo and Nige has generally been careful to not step over the line into full-bore nutjob.
I still get Reform and Reclaim mixed up fwiw. There’s no strong brand there.
Is this the same Farage who instinctively backs every fash or fash-flavoured politician going? Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Putin, etc?
Farage has been a full-bore nutjob his whole life
But he has a low, self-preserving cunning that has so far rendered him unflushable.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
As I have often pointed out, the root cause of poor NHS productivity is lack of investment in facilities and staff education. The same is true across much of the rest of the economy.
Low growth is due to low productivity is due to low capital investment.
Are you sure? What if we lose our best doctors and nurses, don't replace them, let the buildings they work in crumble and leave fancy new technology to other countries? Can't we make that work if we try a little harder?
It would make Rishi's spreadsheet look so much neater.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
LOL. And by chance (or not since one triggered the other) I went to see Stop Making Sense in Nottingham last night. Still a stunningly good concert film even 40 years later.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
What day to day spending? This is capex.
That was my point!
There are right wing arguments about cutting day to day spending, and various suggestions as to areas to cut at the start of this thread by right wingers with their various hobby horses (no surprises for my first pick).
But this is genuine investment on capital. It's what the country desperately needs and is what the country should be spending taxes on, whether from a left or right wing perspective.
Brown tarnished the word investment by calling all expenditure 'investment'. But roads, rails etc are genuine investment. Cutting them to fund day to day spending or tax changes is completely counterproductive!
Accounting rules of course take a binary view of capital vs expense but I think there’s a bit of a sliding scale. Taking investment to mean spending that boosts long term economic productivity I’d categorise as:
1. Hard investment: roads, railways, flood defences etc 2. Soft investment: much of the education and skills budget, preventative healthcare, social housing, grants and tax incentives (DBT, HMRC etc), trade negotiations 3. Current spending with investment component: international development, MoD, child benefit, policing 4. Purely current spending no investment component: debt servicing, pensions and other benefits, palliative care, home office
Each category having some exceptions of course (eg home office granting a visa to a research scientist).
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
LOL. And by chance (or not since one triggered the other) I went to see Stop Making Sense in Nottingham last night. Still a stunningly good concert film even 40 years later.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
20mph would be a dizzying speed in my experience on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel, but, curiously not to the Bridge. I’ve rarely been delayed on my approach to the Bridge but going North my experience is the opposite.
More of a Rotherhithe and Blackwall man myself. Yes the approaches are definitely more stop/start than 20mph but can probably average 20mph over the crossing and a couple of miles either side.
I really think the full efforts of the PM need to be addressed in raising it to 30mph though, otherwise they should not be able to use the flag again.
Whatever happened to the chap with the red flag who used to walk in front of cars?
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
But “woke is just like the blackshirts”: makes you think.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
The Stonehenge tunnel is probably also for the chop.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
The ultimate LTN with extreme parking restrictions: Downing Street.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
Uber clippers with a bike rack section on repeat from Canary Wharf to Greeenwich seem the obvious answer to that one.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
LOL. And by chance (or not since one triggered the other) I went to see Stop Making Sense in Nottingham last night. Still a stunningly good concert film even 40 years later.
I saw David Byrne some years ago at The Big Chill festival. An amazing live show, and agree about Stop Making Sense.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
But “woke is just like the blackshirts”: makes you think.
Lord Cooper of Windrush, David Cameron’s former No 10 director of strategy, told The Independent that he [Sunak] was “out of ideas” and would vote for any candidate best placed to defeat the Conservatives at the general election.
The peer – once dubbed the ex-PM’s “favourite pollster”, said the party was “out of ideas, out of energy”. He added: “There’s no clarity of leadership. It’s not really a party at all … It’s a collection of pretty bitterly-divided factions sellotaped together because there’s an election coming.”
The former Tory, kicked out over his opposition to Brexit, also said the prospect of cutting HS2 was “a catastrophically stupid decision”, adding: “I think everything they’re doing is defined by electoral politics and trying to try to create dividing lines, wedges and traps for Labour rather than by what’s in the interest of the country.”
This seems fairly incredible - but it's reasonably likely that Sen Menendez might avoid the criminal corruption charges. Thanks to the Supreme Court defining political corruption away in most cases.*
Bob Menendez’s prosecutors are already grappling with some tough Supreme Court precedents https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/30/menendez-indictment-supreme-court-00119244 ...“The government’s indictment lays bare remarkable evidence of public corruption,” former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick said of the Menendez case. “The only question for the government to answer is whether these amazing charges fit within the scope of the law of public corruption as the Supreme Court has defined it in recent years. In particular, were these gifts given to Menendez in exchange for ‘official acts,’ which is a narrowly defined term.”
The high court homed in on “official acts” in 2016 when it invalidated the conviction of McDonnell, a Republican who was accused of taking bribes to promote a tobacco company’s products. And earlier this year, in the case of the Cuomo aide, the court restricted the use of a federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive the public of “honest services.” That statute is among the laws Menendez is accused of violating...
*Another interest which Clarence Thomas failed to declare.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
The stripping of Ukraine aid from the bill has nothing to do with the Senate, which was quite prepared to vote for it. And had indeed done so in a bill originating in the Senate, which the GOP majority House rejected.
It was entirely because of the GOP in the House of Representatives, where the fight over the 'debt limit' - a constitutionally dubious concept - originated.
For the nut job wing of the Republicans, every dollar sent to Ukraine is a dollar that could be used for corporate welfare, and reducing the tax bills of the wealthiest 0.5% of the population.
I'm very negative about the future of the world this morning. Tiny wedge issues are being used to drive massive gaps into western liberalism, and the winners will be tyrants and dictators.
Even this country is not immune: we came near to a Corbyn government, and we know what position he would have taken on issues such as Ukraine. The "It's our fault!" approach to defeating fascism.
Erm, did not Corbyn call for Russian withdrawal and demand further sanctions on Russia? But then he was not leading a party floating on a tide of Russian money, nor had he ennobled scions of the KGB.
He was also involved in Stop the War...
Corbyn's position on the war is crass and pathetic - one that pretends to be reasonable, but is actually a defeat-the-west approach. Just look at his behaviour over Salisbury as another example. Pretending to be reasonable, whilst really trying to ensure that our best interests are defeated.
It's easy to appear noble by saying: "We must have peace," when you know that peace now means victory for evil and more war in the future.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Don't neglect the Daily Mirror's enthusiasm for the fascists
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
The government has just delayed (long grass, effective cancellation) of Lower Thames Crossing - a project I was advising on which had almost finished procuring all its main contractors so it could start.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
20mph would be a dizzying speed in my experience on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel, but, curiously not to the Bridge. I’ve rarely been delayed on my approach to the Bridge but going North my experience is the opposite.
More of a Rotherhithe and Blackwall man myself. Yes the approaches are definitely more stop/start than 20mph but can probably average 20mph over the crossing and a couple of miles either side.
I really think the full efforts of the PM need to be addressed in raising it to 30mph though, otherwise they should not be able to use the flag again.
Whatever happened to the chap with the red flag who used to walk in front of cars?
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
An interesting piece by Lord Rothermere. One cannot read to the end, but I suspect he was working toward the 'fascism is our only defence against communism' line.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Don't neglect the Daily Mirror's enthusiasm for the fascists
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
Pity the Sun wasn't around, or we might have got the biggest tits in Fascism.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
I have just finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries which is a fantastic book. Filled with anecdotes from his travels around the world but, more importantly in the context of this discussion, filed with examples of how building more roads doesn't ease congestion and how so many cities are massively improving both traffic flow and quality of life by taking measures to reduce car usage.
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
LOL. And by chance (or not since one triggered the other) I went to see Stop Making Sense in Nottingham last night. Still a stunningly good concert film even 40 years later.
I saw David Byrne some years ago at The Big Chill festival. An amazing live show, and agree about Stop Making Sense.
I went to see American Utopia twice when he was over a few years ago. Very impressive indeed.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
If I could make one motoring enforcement change, it is a throwback so ancient it never even gets discussed. I would like to see traffic police active and tackling dangerous tailgaiting, whilst also enforcing lane discipline.
Doubling traffic policemen back to the level they were at in 2007 is one thing I often argue for.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Don't neglect the Daily Mirror's enthusiasm for the fascists
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
Pity the Sun wasn't around, or we might have got the biggest tits in Fascism.
Should say that at the time the Mirror was owned by the first Lord Rothermere iihtc.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
If I could make one motoring enforcement change, it is a throwback so ancient it never even gets discussed. I would like to see traffic police active and tackling dangerous tailgaiting, whilst also enforcing lane discipline.
Doubling traffic policemen back to the level they were at in 2007 is one thing I often argue for.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
My *guess* is that Dartford has two major traffic flows: those going around the eastern half of the M25 to avoid going through central London on a south<-->north journey, and traffic going from the north<-->Folkestone/Dover?
In which case, the crossing will remove much of that latter traffic from the Dartford Crossing. The question becomes what the traffic analysis for such journeys is.
In the latest levelling-up news, I see that Sunak is giving 55 towns £20m each spread over 10 years to help re-invigorate them. That's £2m per town per year, which feels paltry. Barely enough for a couple of cycle paths each year.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Sunak's decision to end the war on motorists will go down well with many. But it rather begs the question: who on earth has been waging this war on motorists over the last 13 years?
Leaving aside that the War on Motorists is a complete fiction (motoring costs are down 6% in real terms over 10 years, according to the RAC Cost of Motoring index), I wonder if Sunak has realised that we are nearly all motorists rather than them being a separate identifiable group, and that most of us want public realm investment to help us be able to use our motor vehicles a lot less.
We don't want ourselves, our partners, our children and our neighbours forced into dangerous traffic by antisocial parking, yet Sunak is majoring on "reducing parking over-enforcement"; the entire country knows from personal experience that that is 100% sweetbreads and we need more enforcement not less. The Government identified this in a response to the Transport Select Committee back in 2019, and promised to review laws in 2014 - yet here they are still sitting on their butt.
It's like the anti-ULEZ stuff; he's creating a fake issue and trying to leverage a minority constituency. Hail Mary Pass 96.
If I could make one motoring enforcement change, it is a throwback so ancient it never even gets discussed. I would like to see traffic police active and tackling dangerous tailgaiting, whilst also enforcing lane discipline.
Doubling traffic policemen back to the level they were at in 2007 is one thing I often argue for.
Yeah, tech maybe is a more realistic answer. Perhaps get the cars to score the driver on safety, with the worst 1% getting a reminder each month. Be in the worst 1% two months in a year and lose your license.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
RT- off topic, but to follow up a comment made by you yesterday, which had me wondering: what's the rationale of banning tree felling off your own land? Over and atop the criminal damage?
Is it H&S, or the crime of killing something peculiarly irreplaceable? Or to stop developers converting a wood to a fait accompli?
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system by building developments instead of single houses where required.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
This prompted me to go looking at the Woolwich Ferry, without leaving the comfort of my armchair. Can you take a bike on board? The answer isn't obvious. But I was struck by this comment about the pedestrian tunnel:
"No lift on both side. Stink of urine. Bad service on ferry too. How do people get to the other side with bicycle even on foot is a torture. It's 2023 not 1523. I bet its much easier to get to the other side in 1423. This is London. It's worse than a 3rd world country." - R. Ahmad
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Don't neglect the Daily Mirror's enthusiasm for the fascists
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
Erm, wasn't the Daily Mirror owned by the Daily Mail at that time?
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
They are reaching for that era with the Silvertown Tunnel, and proposing a bike bus.
I think at the moment all there is is the docklands cable car and the Woolwich Ferry, and railways as available. None of these cut it.
My suspicion is that pent-up demand for river crossings by people riding bikes in East London is 10s of thousands a day just for a start - given that there is nothing convenient east of Tower Bridge.
Silvertown is providing a lot of extra capacity, and major increases in traffic count are not predicted, the logical thing seems to be an experimental closing of Rotherhithe to motors for 18 months under an ETRO to see what happens once Silvertown opens in ~2025. Rotherhithe already has a 2 ton weight limit and narrow 2.4m lane widths, and relatively low traffic flows.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system.
Again a myth. What you fail to realise in your ignorance is that the local plans do exactly what you want them to do. They zone areas for housing, retail and industrial development. Now you may argue that the balance is wrong but that is not the fault of the planning system - almost all of which is to do with insisting that the principle of 'polluter pays' - introduced by Thatcher is enforced.
The main obstruction to smaller firms taking up the land available under local plans is the difficulty in getting finance - as has been repeatedly mentioned by many of the smaller developers over the years.
Big developers don't like planning laws because it makes them abide by rules designed to protect the environment and heritage as well as making sure the houses they biuld are fit for purpose. That is why they scream and that is who you are shilling for with your ignorant bollocks.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system by building developments instead of single houses where required.
Most loft conversions fall under deemed planning permission and don't need specific planning permission.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
I came across someone once who’d actually used that ride. Why, apart from the experience, I can’t recall.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system.
Again a myth. What you fail to realise in your ignorance is that the local plans do exactly what you want them to do. They zone areas for housing, retail and industrial development. Now you may argue that the balance is wrong but that is not the fault of the planning system - almost all of which is to do with insisting that the principle of 'polluter pays' - introduced by Thatcher is enforced.
The main obstruction to smaller firms taking up the land available under local plans is the difficulty in getting finance - as has been repeatedly mentioned by many of the smaller developers over the years.
Big developers don't like planning laws because it makes them abide by rules designed to protect the environment and heritage as well as making sure the houses they biuld are fit for purpose. That is why they scream and that is who you are shilling for with your ignorant bollocks.
So an area zoned for housing, a developer can just build on that without seeking consent first? Like in Japan. If I buy a single property worth of land in a housing zone I can bulldoze whatever's on it and redevelop it without begging permission first? Or if its vacant I can just build on it without begging permission first?
No, that's a lie. It s not the case, you're being dishonest.
Building homes is not "pollution". Thatcher's system has failed.
People need services, homes don't, forcing people to live in overcrowded slums because of an inability to build houses where required unless a developer comes with a hundred homes to place down and then we're at the timeline of what suits them is not working.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system by building developments instead of single houses where required.
Most loft conversions fall under deemed planning permission and don't need specific planning permission.
Self-built / managed single house builds run at 30-40k per annum in England, according to Govt stats from 2020. That's higher than I thought it was TBH - I though 20-25k.
So - yes a fair amount of paperwork, and some scope for simplification, but certainly possible. The main squeeze is plots in the South-East and some other high-demand areas. I know a fair number of people who moved to Scotland because self-building there is easier.
The issue with HS2 is not just the issue itself. It is that the government has utterly devalued its promises.
An example from round here. Simon Fell, the MP for Barrow and for where I live under the new boundaries has made much of the submarine contracts for BaE in Barrow. He said that government was keen to ensure that whatever else was needed to help with this would be done ie other local infrastructure etc. One of the very many needed things is an upgrade to the A595.
Will we get it to make things easier for "motorists"? Or will it be canned like other necessary infrastructure projects? The pathetic faffing about over HS2 has not just undermined Tory MPs around Manchester, Leeds etc but here also because of the understandable cynicism about whether any promises are worth even the spit used to make them.
Even if you agreed with every single policy promise the Tories make between now and the GE, why would you rely on them keeping their word?
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system by building developments instead of single houses where required.
Most loft conversions fall under deemed planning permission and don't need specific planning permission.
Most is not all.
Richard was for ages repeating a claim that 90% of planning requests are granted as falsely equating that to houses. That 90% figure turned out to be from conversions to existing houses - eg loft conversions, greenhouses etc and not new builds which was considerably lower despite the fact our Byzantine system already puts off new build requests in the first place anyway.
To give him credit though, Richard has quite a bit of integrity, though I don't agree with him on this issue he's never repeated the 90% figure again since his error was shown to him which is good. Many people here repeat falsehoods no matter how many times they've been dismissed. Credit to Richard for that, he made a mistake, but he's not repeating it anymore and that is good on him. 👍
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system.
Again a myth. What you fail to realise in your ignorance is that the local plans do exactly what you want them to do. They zone areas for housing, retail and industrial development. Now you may argue that the balance is wrong but that is not the fault of the planning system - almost all of which is to do with insisting that the principle of 'polluter pays' - introduced by Thatcher is enforced.
The main obstruction to smaller firms taking up the land available under local plans is the difficulty in getting finance - as has been repeatedly mentioned by many of the smaller developers over the years.
Big developers don't like planning laws because it makes them abide by rules designed to protect the environment and heritage as well as making sure the houses they biuld are fit for purpose. That is why they scream and that is who you are shilling for with your ignorant bollocks.
So an area zoned for housing, a developer can just build on that without seeking consent first? Like in Japan. If I buy a single property worth of land in a housing zone I can bulldoze whatever's on it and redevelop it without begging permission first? Or if its vacant I can just build on it without begging permission first?
No, that's a lie. It s not the case, you're being dishonest.
Building homes is not "pollution". Thatcher's system has failed.
People need services, homes don't, forcing people to live in overcrowded slums because of an inability to build houses where required unless a developer comes with a hundred homes to place down and then we're at the timeline of what suits them is not working.
Building homes most certainly is pollution, in the sense that it brings pollution, both at the building stage, and permanently when people live there. As the builders make money from the capital cost of inflicting this pollution, they should certainly pay for the capital cost of remedying that. Likewise with schools and other services. Why should I pay as a taxpayer? And why should the shareholders of GrotWater pay for the benefit of the shareholders of DollsHousesPlc?
Whilst not into football, I'd just like to mention that my local footie club, Cambourne Town, won the FA Grassroots Club of the Year award back in August.
I know a couple of the people heavily involved in the club, and it's good to see their effort rewarded.
He appears to admit that if elected councils, including Tory ones, want to introduce 20mph zones they still can. Suggests govt, despite the “anti war on motorists” rhetoric this week, isn’t actually banning them…
Oh dear God - someone please put Rishi out of his misery. When John Major announced the Cone Hotline, there was an actual hotline. Sunak announces the 20mph ban, and has to immediately accept he can't actually ban 20mph.
I assume he will continue to claim he has done so. And PB Tories et al will continue to make out that he has done so, even as the reality hangs in the air like a bad smell...
That's interesting because I can't think of a single PB Tory et al this week who has been impressed by Sunak.
Even HYUFD seems a tad embarrassed.
Sunak's performative bullshit isn't impressing anyone that I can see. If he wanted to actually make our roads better he could fund the long overdue construction of major new roads.
But that would take spending money. So he won't. So he does this crap that nobody admires instead.
Starmer could easily outflank Sunak here by pledging to finish HS2 AND fund the construction of major new road building for drivers too.
Boosting day to day spending isn't ideal, but the countries critical transport infrastructure needs investment and Sunak won't do it.
Sunak will be hugely disappointed. I believe he reads PB, and his recent pronouncements seem to me to have a laser-like focus on winning back your, Barty's, personal endorsement, with their focus on cars and suburban living. But to no avail. He's blown it.
Sunak, if you are reading this, then here is how to get my vote.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Except number 2 is a myth created by your own bias and ignorance.
Number 2 is a fact as demonstrated by your own figures that you misused as you misunderstood them to try to contradict me.
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system.
Again a myth. What you fail to realise in your ignorance is that the local plans do exactly what you want them to do. They zone areas for housing, retail and industrial development. Now you may argue that the balance is wrong but that is not the fault of the planning system - almost all of which is to do with insisting that the principle of 'polluter pays' - introduced by Thatcher is enforced.
The main obstruction to smaller firms taking up the land available under local plans is the difficulty in getting finance - as has been repeatedly mentioned by many of the smaller developers over the years.
Big developers don't like planning laws because it makes them abide by rules designed to protect the environment and heritage as well as making sure the houses they biuld are fit for purpose. That is why they scream and that is who you are shilling for with your ignorant bollocks.
So an area zoned for housing, a developer can just build on that without seeking consent first? Like in Japan. If I buy a single property worth of land in a housing zone I can bulldoze whatever's on it and redevelop it without begging permission first? Or if its vacant I can just build on it without begging permission first?
No, that's a lie. It s not the case, you're being dishonest.
Building homes is not "pollution". Thatcher's system has failed.
People need services, homes don't, forcing people to live in overcrowded slums because of an inability to build houses where required unless a developer comes with a hundred homes to place down and then we're at the timeline of what suits them is not working.
Building homes most certainly is pollution, in the sense that it brings pollution, both at the building stage, and permanently when people live there. As the builders make money from the capital cost of inflicting this pollution, they should certainly pay for the capital cost of remedying that. Likewise with schools and other services. Why should I pay as a taxpayer? And why should the shareholders of GrotWater pay for the benefit of the shareholders of DollsHousesPlc?
No it brings absolutely zero pollution when people live there.
People bring pollution, houses don't.
Cramming 16 people into a slum that was built for 4 leads to no less pollution than having 16 people in 4 houses meant for 4.
Taxpayers should pay for schools. Water consumers should pay for water. Houses are neither here nor there.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
I came across someone once who’d actually used that ride. Why, apart from the experience, I can’t recall.
Russia is already at war with the West. The programme of subversion and propaganda, bribery, blackmail and murder against the UK alone marks Putinist Russia as an aggressor state. Yes, it is a hybrid war rather than a full scale military attack but threats to our communications cables, oil platforms and the rest are simply one step away from acts of war. The aggression in Ukraine will not cease if the West betrays its commitments to Kyiv. In fact Russia has made it clear that the defeat of Ukraine would be merely the first step in the subjugation of the whole of Europe.
Russia will not stop unless it is stopped. The West must face down the Moscow tyranny, and it is utterly wishful thinking that anything short of the Military defeat of Moscow will save us.
Russian subversion of the US and other Western democracies is very well advanced. We may only have a few months to save ourselves. To lose would see the end of the freedom we have taken for granted. It really is that simple.
I think that you are correct that Russia is at war with the west, but this has been the case for at least 20 years, this war is just a stage in that process and not some kind of existential endgame. Inevitably some pragmatism has to come in to play about how resources are best deployed.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. The reputation of Russia has been destroyed in the west. The war hasn't gone to plan. It has been hard work for them, the war is not that popular in Russia. They have lost vast amounts of troops. Their visions of imperial expansion have been revealed as fantasies. The Wagner group has imploded. NATO has expanded. The Russian economy - based on oil and gas- is going to get more and more obsolete as alternatives evolve and the war has accelerated this.
There are reasons for pessimism too. See US shutdown vote yesterday where Ukraine was offered up as the sacrificial lamb, and the Slovakian election result. Russia still has enough useful idiots dotted around the West to undermine opposition.
Russian propaganda is not totally inept. They’ve managed to persuade much of the US Right (and European counterparts) that they are the last bastion of white, Christian civilisation, despite having very low church attendance, a huge Muslim population, high rates of divorce and abortion. It’s enough that Putin persecuted gays.
I'm sure we all remember Leon extolling Putin's virtue as a champion of western values and anti-woke, before he turned into Hitler reincarnated (Putin, that is...)?
Tbf Leon has a reliable track record of backing future pariahs and failures (Putin, Truss, MTG, Boebart...)
If he ever decides to back, the Tories will be nailed on to win.
MTG? Boebart? I don’t even know who they are
Putin is not a failure by his own metrics. I’m not even sure he is a pariah
That is a liberal west-o-centric view of him, and even in the west he has many fans (not me, even if I do entirely agree with his diagnosis of Woke, just as I agree with Hitler on autobahns)
I appreciate your love for Vlad is a big embarrassment for you but console yourself that you didn't have the reach of Rothermere:
What's so interesting about that article, of course, is that back then Fascism was the bright new thing. It was very popular amongst the young - and that article decries political rule by and for old men in their middle 60s.
Today, many of the youth worship at the fountain of Woke and see that as the future - as well as pulling down any symbols of the West and Establishment more broadly - and also decry political rule by and for older people.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I'm sorry but the Italians did not invent football, what nonsense is that. Makes me suspect that the whole piece is probably flawed.
Don't neglect the Daily Mirror's enthusiasm for the fascists
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
Why not do both?
Seriously, though: infrastructure investment is, in the medium and long term, some of the best investment that governments can make. Short-term pain for long-term gain. With the railways, we are mostly relying on infrastructure first built between 200 and 150 years ago (though obviously much updated). With motorways, built mostly between 60 and 30 years ago.
Governments, perhaps due to treasury pressure, have utterly forgotten this - and it is harming the country. Kudos the the Scottish (and to a lesser extent Welsh) governments who have led the way in reopening railways, as an example.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
The Greenwich Foot Tunnel will suffer from Lutfur Rahman running Tower Hamlets. And it is only 2 metres wide, which does not meet minimum spec for shared cycling / walking paths, which is 3m. And it is not accessible 24/7, even to pedestrians, as the lifts are only part time. I'd say that will never be suitable for mass transit, which is the need.
Very effective low volume schemes were used for some time with Red and Green lights indicating when cycling was allowed.
There have been talks about putting unlawful barriers in it, which would also block some wheelchairs and other mobility aids. If they try that game, they will get an EA2010 legal action so fast Lutfur will leave his pop-socks behind.
Yes the cable car takes cycles free before 9:30am, at the cost of a wait in the queue, and a £6 fair after that time. Not exactly practical.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
Why not do both?
Seriously, though: infrastructure investment is, in the medium and long term, some of the best investment that governments can make. Short-term pain for long-term gain. With the railways, we are mostly relying on infrastructure first built between 200 and 150 years ago (though obviously much updated). With motorways, built mostly between 60 and 30 years ago.
Governments, perhaps due to treasury pressure, have utterly forgotten this - and it is harming the country. Kudos the the Scottish (and to a lesser extent Welsh) governments who have led the way in reopening railways, as an example.
Agreed 100%
If we'd continued building motorways at the rate we were 30-60 years ago for the past 30 years then how much more productive would our economy be now?
And what's worse is that 30-60 years ago the population was stable, but we saw rapid GDP per capita growth from all this investment. For the past 30 years we've seen rapid population growth, but negligible investment and wonder why our productivity has stalled.
Sunak on Kuenssberg this morning: nervous (really needs to get his gulping under control, it's quite distracting); became increasingly tetchy; talked all over her again and again and again; refused to make decisions on HS2, 20mph zones, or tax cuts; refused to say anything good about Starmer, which added to the grumpy mood.
Finished with "Actually I don't think saying nothing and hiding is actually the right type of leadership, I actually think that's an abdication of leadership", which was quite funny given what had gone on before. Actually.
It seems clear that the Tories are going to try to push a "man of action Sunak" vs "steady as she goes Starmer" narrative. Given that, it's bizarre that he didn't have at least one concrete decision to point at. It's probably sustainable if the conference itself brings more clarity - but if they're hoping to drag the confusion and dithering out til the Autumn statement, he'll risk becoming a national joke.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
The Greenwich Foot Tunnel will suffer from Lutfur Rahman running Tower Hamlets. And it is only 2 metres wide, which does not meet minimum spec for shared cycling / walking paths, which is 3m. And it is not accessible 24/7, even to pedestrians, as the lifts are only part time. I'd say that will never be suitable for mass transit, which is the need.
Very effective low volume schemes were used for some time with Red and Green lights indicating when cycling was allowed.
There have been talks about putting unlawful barriers in it, which would also block some wheelchairs and other mobility aids. If they try that game, they will get an EA2010 legal action so fast Lutfur will leave his pop-socks behind.
Yes the cable car takes cycles free before 9:30am, at the cost of a wait in the queue, and a £6 fair after that time. Not exactly practical.
The point is getting off your bike and pushing it for a few minutes is rather more practical than cycling all the way to central London to cross the river, then head back again!
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
Sunak on Kuenssberg this morning: nervous (really needs to get his gulping under control, it's quite distracting); became increasingly tetchy; talked all over her again and again and again; refused to make decisions on HS2, 20mph zones, or tax cuts; refused to say anything good about Starmer, which added to the grumpy mood.
Finished with "Actually I don't think saying nothing and hiding is actually the right type of leadership, I actually think that's an abdication of leadership", which was quite funny given what had gone on before. Actually.
It seems clear that the Tories are going to try to push a "man of action Sunak" vs "steady as she goes Starmer" narrative. Given that, it's bizarre that he didn't have at least one concrete decision to point at. It's probably sustainable if the conference itself brings more clarity - but if they're hoping to drag the confusion and dithering out til the Autumn statement, he'll risk becoming a national joke.
The problem is that Sunak wants to cut any and all actions he can so that he can use that money for tax cuts - and no doubt tax cuts not aimed where we have serious problems (eg where marginal tax rates are 80%) but instead just splashed out to attract votes instead.
If Sunak wants to be a "motorists friend" or anything else there's plenty of investment the government can and should be doing which would make him a man of action - but all of that costs money.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
Why not do both?
Seriously, though: infrastructure investment is, in the medium and long term, some of the best investment that governments can make. Short-term pain for long-term gain. With the railways, we are mostly relying on infrastructure first built between 200 and 150 years ago (though obviously much updated). With motorways, built mostly between 60 and 30 years ago.
Governments, perhaps due to treasury pressure, have utterly forgotten this - and it is harming the country. Kudos the the Scottish (and to a lesser extent Welsh) governments who have led the way in reopening railways, as an example.
Agreed 100%
If we'd continued building motorways at the rate we were 30-60 years ago for the past 30 years then how much more productive would our economy be now?
And what's worse is that 30-60 years ago the population was stable, but we saw rapid GDP per capita growth from all this investment. For the past 30 years we've seen rapid population growth, but negligible investment and wonder why our productivity has stalled.
There were 1,000 miles of motorway built in the 1960s. That would imply there should be about 7,000 miles now. Adjusted for population change, 8,000 miles?
There are currently 2,300 miles of motorway, so you're talking nearly quadrupling the number.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
Isn't this part of Mark Harper's newly minted plan to Save the World by spending £20bn on new roads, along with digging up Stonehenge for £1.7bn (or has that gone as well to find money for tax cuts?) and another one I have forgotten.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
My grandfather, a Co-op door-to-door insurance man in his latter years, had a territory which included Gravesend with South-East Thurrock. He used to take his bike on the old Tilbury Ferry.
THere's also the Woolwich Ferry extant today, and the tunnel from the Isle of Dogs, unless cycles are banned in the latter?
The Greenwich foot tunnel is ace. You're technically not allowed to actually cycle through, but you can take bikes through - and many people do. Ditto the Woolwich tunnel. It seems a reasonable compromise, given the nature of the tunnels.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
The Greenwich Foot Tunnel will suffer from Lutfur Rahman running Tower Hamlets. And it is only 2 metres wide, which does not meet minimum spec for shared cycling / walking paths, which is 3m. And it is not accessible 24/7, even to pedestrians, as the lifts are only part time. I'd say that will never be suitable for mass transit, which is the need.
Very effective low volume schemes were used for some time with Red and Green lights indicating when cycling was allowed.
There have been talks about putting unlawful barriers in it, which would also block some wheelchairs and other mobility aids. If they try that game, they will get an EA2010 legal action so fast Lutfur will leave his pop-socks behind.
Yes the cable car takes cycles free before 9:30am, at the cost of a wait in the queue, and a £6 fair after that time. Not exactly practical.
The point is getting off your bike and pushing it for a few minutes is rather more practical than cycling all the way to central London to cross the river, then head back again!
Don't led the perfect be the enemy of the good...
It isn't good, though. It is a horrible, substandard bodge.
I would put a repurposed Rotherhithe Tunnel as "good", and about 4-6 active travel bridges throughout East London as "perfect".
Perfect will happen - perhaps in 3 or 4 decades, and will depend on demand.
That would be rather more justifiable than crippling HS2.
There is only way to end the low growth econony. Cull all investment and panic. It is the only way.
It's a fair point, though, that some choices will have to be made. The cost/benefit case for the Thames tunnel is very poor, and it has yet to start.
What is needed - and there's no great likelihood that Labour will be massively better, though they certainly can't be as bad - is a government which can work out what is effective investment and what isn't.
I am not an expert on the cost/benefit of such projects but do know that without it drivers in Kent and Essex shall be limited to 20mph at rush hours for decades to come, and that is egregiously against long established British values.
The paucity of Thames crossings in the eastern half of London is a real problem. When there are problems with the Blackwall Tunnel, as there have been this weekend, traffic right across SE London becomes snarled up completely, it is really quite remarkable how widespread an impact it has.
Especially since the main complaint presented in the article about the new tunnel is that it "would not solve the problems at the Dartford Crossing, which would still remain overcapacity".
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
What, though, would be the comparative economic return on £10bn spent on NPR ?
Why not do both?
Seriously, though: infrastructure investment is, in the medium and long term, some of the best investment that governments can make. Short-term pain for long-term gain. With the railways, we are mostly relying on infrastructure first built between 200 and 150 years ago (though obviously much updated). With motorways, built mostly between 60 and 30 years ago.
Governments, perhaps due to treasury pressure, have utterly forgotten this - and it is harming the country. Kudos the the Scottish (and to a lesser extent Welsh) governments who have led the way in reopening railways, as an example.
Agreed 100%
If we'd continued building motorways at the rate we were 30-60 years ago for the past 30 years then how much more productive would our economy be now?
And what's worse is that 30-60 years ago the population was stable, but we saw rapid GDP per capita growth from all this investment. For the past 30 years we've seen rapid population growth, but negligible investment and wonder why our productivity has stalled.
There were 1,000 miles of motorway built in the 1960s. That would imply there should be about 7,000 miles now. Adjusted for population change, 8,000 miles?
There are currently 2,300 miles of motorway, so you're talking nearly quadrupling the number.
Yes, absolutely! That's what should have happened.
Which would boost GDP per capita tremendously and relieve local roads to serve only local traffic and not through traffic, which would enable local roads to be used by much fewer cars (since they'd be on the motorways for all but the last few miles) and have more cycling and public transport.
Comments
He is a big advocate of the work of Jan Gehl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gehl
Needless to say I am sure Bart would absolutely hate the book. Or at least the sections on urban planning. What Byrne has to say about politics in the various countries he visits is also fascinating, if sometimes subsequently proved to be misguided.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/02/david-byrne-bicycles-diaries-review
And all just to keep Larry safe.
I really think the full efforts of the PM need to be addressed in raising it to 30mph though, otherwise they should not be able to use the flag again.
Low growth is due to low productivity is due to low capital investment.
It would make Rishi's spreadsheet look so much neater.
If he really wants it they could use PFI, as they are at the half-built Silvertown tunnel.
Meanwhile the furthest east practical cycling crossing across the Thames is I think Tower Bridge, that is until the Rotherhithe Tunnel is taken off the road network in a few years.
1. Hard investment: roads, railways, flood defences etc
2. Soft investment: much of the education and skills budget, preventative healthcare, social housing, grants and tax incentives (DBT, HMRC etc), trade negotiations
3. Current spending with investment component: international development, MoD, child benefit, policing
4. Purely current spending no investment component: debt servicing, pensions and other benefits, palliative care, home office
Each category having some exceptions of course (eg home office granting a visa to a research scientist).
Humour is good this morning on PB
Thanks to the Supreme Court defining political corruption away in most cases.*
Bob Menendez’s prosecutors are already grappling with some tough Supreme Court precedents
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/30/menendez-indictment-supreme-court-00119244
...“The government’s indictment lays bare remarkable evidence of public corruption,” former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick said of the Menendez case. “The only question for the government to answer is whether these amazing charges fit within the scope of the law of public corruption as the Supreme Court has defined it in recent years. In particular, were these gifts given to Menendez in exchange for ‘official acts,’ which is a narrowly defined term.”
The high court homed in on “official acts” in 2016 when it invalidated the conviction of McDonnell, a Republican who was accused of taking bribes to promote a tobacco company’s products. And earlier this year, in the case of the Cuomo aide, the court restricted the use of a federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive the public of “honest services.” That statute is among the laws Menendez is accused of violating...
*Another interest which Clarence Thomas failed to declare.
1. Houses. Build. Build. Build.
2. Sort out our Byzantine planning laws that mean solo housing developments are almost impossible and we have an oligopoly of developers instead.
3. Equalise taxes on people working for a living, and those not working for their income. Eg National Insurance applied to all incomes Income Tax does. Do that and you could cut the taxes on those working for a living (or fund expenditure).
4. Want to improve our roads? Build some! Our population has increased by a quarter since our roads last had significant investment.
5. End fiscal drag.
There. Hope he reads it, but not holding my breath. Starmer, Davey, if you're reading this, my vote is up for grabs if any of you follow this agenda.
Corbyn's position on the war is crass and pathetic - one that pretends to be reasonable, but is actually a defeat-the-west approach. Just look at his behaviour over Salisbury as another example. Pretending to be reasonable, whilst really trying to ensure that our best interests are defeated.
It's easy to appear noble by saying: "We must have peace," when you know that peace now means victory for evil and more war in the future.
The Mirror and the Pictorial also planned a photographic beauty contest aimed at finding Britain's prettiest woman fascist - though Mosley personally objected to this, saying the paper was trivialising his movement.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/revealed-the-fascist-past-of-the-daily-mirror-77871.html
On football supporters, they seem to be very reactionary. Much twitter trolling by the lobotomised part of the Right comes from football affiliated accounts - though I suspect for some it is just a game.
Absolute madness.
So, er, how will cancelling the tunnel increase capacity at the Dartford Crossing?
If cross-Thames capacity is the problem, campaign for more - not less. It smells like yet another instance of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Perhaps we need some more of these:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/10000-tailgaters-have-been-caught-in-just-two-weeks-by-new-road-cameras/
In which case, the crossing will remove much of that latter traffic from the Dartford Crossing. The question becomes what the traffic analysis for such journeys is.
Is it H&S, or the crime of killing something peculiarly irreplaceable? Or to stop developers converting a wood to a fait accompli?
If you want to get planning consent for a loft conversion, 90% of that gets approved, as you demonstrated, but planning for houses? Near-on impossible unless you're in the oligopoly of developers that can work the system by building developments instead of single houses where required.
"No lift on both side. Stink of urine. Bad service on ferry too. How do people get to the other side with bicycle even on foot is a torture. It's 2023 not 1523. I bet its much easier to get to the other side in 1423. This is London. It's worse than a 3rd world country." - R. Ahmad
Where is S Korea is this royal palace ?
ETA ah, I see you have later acknowledged this.
I think at the moment all there is is the docklands cable car and the Woolwich Ferry, and railways as available. None of these cut it.
My suspicion is that pent-up demand for river crossings by people riding bikes in East London is 10s of thousands a day just for a start - given that there is nothing convenient east of Tower Bridge.
Silvertown is providing a lot of extra capacity, and major increases in traffic count are not predicted, the logical thing seems to be an experimental closing of Rotherhithe to motors for 18 months under an ETRO to see what happens once Silvertown opens in ~2025. Rotherhithe already has a 2 ton weight limit and narrow 2.4m lane widths, and relatively low traffic flows.
I think the stupid cable car can also take bikes.
The main obstruction to smaller firms taking up the land available under local plans is the difficulty in getting finance - as has been repeatedly mentioned by many of the smaller developers over the years.
Big developers don't like planning laws because it makes them abide by rules designed to protect the environment and heritage as well as making sure the houses they biuld are fit for purpose. That is why they scream and that is who you are shilling for with your ignorant bollocks.
No, that's a lie. It s not the case, you're being dishonest.
Building homes is not "pollution". Thatcher's system has failed.
People need services, homes don't, forcing people to live in overcrowded slums because of an inability to build houses where required unless a developer comes with a hundred homes to place down and then we're at the timeline of what suits them is not working.
So - yes a fair amount of paperwork, and some scope for simplification, but certainly possible. The main squeeze is plots in the South-East and some other high-demand areas. I know a fair number of people who moved to Scotland because self-building there is easier.
An example from round here. Simon Fell, the MP for Barrow and for where I live under the new boundaries has made much of the submarine contracts for BaE in Barrow. He said that government was keen to ensure that whatever else was needed to help with this would be done ie other local infrastructure etc. One of the very many needed things is an upgrade to the A595.
Will we get it to make things easier for "motorists"? Or will it be canned like other necessary infrastructure projects? The pathetic faffing about over HS2 has not just undermined Tory MPs around Manchester, Leeds etc but here also because of the understandable cynicism about whether any promises are worth even the spit used to make them.
Even if you agreed with every single policy promise the Tories make between now and the GE, why would you rely on them keeping their word?
Richard was for ages repeating a claim that 90% of planning requests are granted as falsely equating that to houses. That 90% figure turned out to be from conversions to existing houses - eg loft conversions, greenhouses etc and not new builds which was considerably lower despite the fact our Byzantine system already puts off new build requests in the first place anyway.
To give him credit though, Richard has quite a bit of integrity, though I don't agree with him on this issue he's never repeated the 90% figure again since his error was shown to him which is good. Many people here repeat falsehoods no matter how many times they've been dismissed. Credit to Richard for that, he made a mistake, but he's not repeating it anymore and that is good on him. 👍
I know a couple of the people heavily involved in the club, and it's good to see their effort rewarded.
https://www.cambridgeshirefa.com/news/2023/aug/08/cambourne-town-award
People bring pollution, houses don't.
Cramming 16 people into a slum that was built for 4 leads to no less pollution than having 16 people in 4 houses meant for 4.
Taxpayers should pay for schools. Water consumers should pay for water. Houses are neither here nor there.
Seriously, though: infrastructure investment is, in the medium and long term, some of the best investment that governments can make. Short-term pain for long-term gain. With the railways, we are mostly relying on infrastructure first built between 200 and 150 years ago (though obviously much updated). With motorways, built mostly between 60 and 30 years ago.
Governments, perhaps due to treasury pressure, have utterly forgotten this - and it is harming the country. Kudos the the Scottish (and to a lesser extent Welsh) governments who have led the way in reopening railways, as an example.
Very effective low volume schemes were used for some time with Red and Green lights indicating when cycling was allowed.
There have been talks about putting unlawful barriers in it, which would also block some wheelchairs and other mobility aids. If they try that game, they will get an EA2010 legal action so fast Lutfur will leave his pop-socks behind.
Yes the cable car takes cycles free before 9:30am, at the cost of a wait in the queue, and a £6 fair after that time. Not exactly practical.
If we'd continued building motorways at the rate we were 30-60 years ago for the past 30 years then how much more productive would our economy be now?
And what's worse is that 30-60 years ago the population was stable, but we saw rapid GDP per capita growth from all this investment. For the past 30 years we've seen rapid population growth, but negligible investment and wonder why our productivity has stalled.
Finished with "Actually I don't think saying nothing and hiding is actually the right type of leadership, I actually think that's an abdication of leadership", which was quite funny given what had gone on before. Actually.
It seems clear that the Tories are going to try to push a "man of action Sunak" vs "steady as she goes Starmer" narrative. Given that, it's bizarre that he didn't have at least one concrete decision to point at. It's probably sustainable if the conference itself brings more clarity - but if they're hoping to drag the confusion and dithering out til the Autumn statement, he'll risk becoming a national joke.
Don't led the perfect be the enemy of the good...
Need more clues
If Sunak wants to be a "motorists friend" or anything else there's plenty of investment the government can and should be doing which would make him a man of action - but all of that costs money.
@guardian
Rishi Sunak refuses to commit to tax cuts after Gove says they should happen before election – UK politics live
I listened closely to the PM on the BBC.
It sounded like he’s already decided to cancel rail investment in the North but also decided not to tell us while he’s in town.
I hope I’m wrong and am ready to meet at any time while he’s here. Surely we’re owed a conversation at least?
There are currently 2,300 miles of motorway, so you're talking nearly quadrupling the number.
I would put a repurposed Rotherhithe Tunnel as "good", and about 4-6 active travel bridges throughout East London as "perfect".
Perfect will happen - perhaps in 3 or 4 decades, and will depend on demand.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said British troops training soldiers in Ukraine would be a legal target.
The PM clarifies comments made by the defence secretary that suggested British soldiers may enter Ukraine for training purposes.
https://trib.al/Rx0iR33
Which would boost GDP per capita tremendously and relieve local roads to serve only local traffic and not through traffic, which would enable local roads to be used by much fewer cars (since they'd be on the motorways for all but the last few miles) and have more cycling and public transport.
What a bloody tragedy that hasn't happened.
The Tories meet in Manchester plagued by their delusions, desperation and divisions
https://x.com/andrewrawnsley/status/1708412475199103435?s=20
Or Russia could fuck off back to Russia and end the war.