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How Sunak’s speech is being covered – politicalbetting.com
How Sunak’s speech is being covered – politicalbetting.com
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How Sunak’s speech is being covered – politicalbetting.com
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Lilian Greenwood
@LilianGreenwood
·
3h
YCMIU - according to the Tory Transport Secretary’s new fairytale published this afternoon, there’s “the potential to extend the Nottingham Tram system to serve …Clifton South”. (Clifton South opened more than 8 years ago). Do they even know where the East Midlands is?
Great. And your problem with that is?
So if other areas had better road density, they could cope with more driving too. And since 95% of freight mileage comes on the roads, and 90% of passenger mileage comes on the roads, then any extra driving would be GDP growth.
Just because our road situation is better than elsewhere, doesn't mean its worse than it should be. Had we continued to invest in our roads at the same rate as we had in the 60s then we'd be much better off now and our GDP/capita would have continued to grow just as it did in the 60s and 70s.
You could literally double all rail capacity and that would be a miniscule boost in freight capacity nationwide, but if you double road capacity then since 95% of transport comes on roads that takes you to 190% capacity.
Its almost as if investment in infrastructure works, seems like you're coming around.
The net result of this, they say, is that they west coast rail line itself will have to be upgraded, but that can only be achieved by shutting it at vast expense/ traveller hassle in a few years’ time.
Jeremy Hunt
@Jeremy_Hunt
HS2 is absolutely vital. Totally agree w
@andy4wm
. Post Brexit we must be AMBITIOUS for our country and hungry for our economy. What signal would it send if we cancelled our highest profile infrastructure project and weakened our commitment to share prosperity around the country?
2:16 PM · May 20, 2019"
https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1130462314304552960
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
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18m
If Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Liz Truss all think Rishi Sunak is pursuing the wrong strategy, and Rishi Sunak thinks Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Liz Truss were pursuing the wrong strategy, what are the British people meant to think…
@georgeeaton
Tory conference showed what a significant media player GB News has become in just two years. It will be even more influential in opposition.
This is like the dodgiest iof 'clever' budgets. It won't withstand scrutiny.
https://x.com/CaliforniaFrizz/status/1709512739582816604?s=20
How long can a station keep calling itself "the home of free speech" when it continues to engage in cancel culture? I supported my friends/colleagues and will continue to do so. That should not be a fireable offence. GB News is controlled opposition.
https://x.com/calvinrobinson/status/1709584551926804768?s=20
Twitter/X has officially removed article headlines on links shared to the platform, now just displaying the image and website.
https://twitter.com/PopBase/status/1709655415850746242
For now it's still usable, but steadily becoming less so.
(Doubling rail coverage from a low base is not the same as doubling road coverage)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220703142101/https://fcofe.org.uk/2022/06/26/calvin-robinson-was-ordained-to-the-diaconate/
I don't understand the business plan at all. Live TV is expensive and you will always have the OFCOM issue and I don't think there is much demand for one minute having a Colin Brazier or Alister Stewart types, next the mad bloke of Coast.
Nobody gets big viewership or has made money out of tv news in the UK and the use of "shock-jock" approaches like having Farage on has a limited market and shelf life (he was similarly success on LBC, but its never Tucker Carlson popular).
Compare UnHerd which is funded by the same people, you can see how that can work out businesswise.
The 2 main parties have always moved between their centrist and more extreme ideological wings and back
Your argument is as illogical as your contention that just because something is working doesn't mean we don't need more of it.
By your logic London already had rail so has no need for Crossrail.
Housing is affordable (relatively) and private transport (also relatively) is too. Win/win.
Oh and it's not just my environment. 95% of nationwide freight mileage, 90% of nationwide passenger mileage and 75% of commuters everywhere except London are all by driving too. The remainder of commuters mostly walk.
If only we had some investment too. Unfortunately the train obsessives who think they're normal and I'm the odd one out run the country.
https://x.com/martina/status/1709653771788091516
“Owen [Jones] getting schooled, so to speak.”
But I actually agree - I think public transport is simply an efficient way to provide infrastructure in high density areas. The real driver of those productivity levels is the melting pot of lots of people interacting with each other.
Areas of the north with higher density are, I assume, the areas with the higher productivity. But those areas are likely constrained by a lack of decent public transport. I'll test this later.
Yes getting 21 serfs to live in a 2 bed apartment may be productive but it's a form of productivity I have no interest in thank you very much.
Bear in mind home ownership and affordability is more important in your data analysis than "productivity".
Also try analysing productivity growth per year versus new motorway mileage over past 65 years.
If you're not interested in economic growth in the north, that's fine. But you'd have the same problem in Warrington if it suddenly became attractive for investment.
The reason houses are more affordable here isn't a lack of growth, it's because housing growth has kept up with population growth as we aren't as catastrophically overcrowded.
I'm not interested in piling people into failed slums. If we wanted that, may as well live in Bangalore.
But since you care about productivity let's look at productivity. Productivity growth has been appalling this century which is directly correlated and causatively related to the fact that we stopped investing in roads.
Since 2001 our population has grown by almost 25% but there's been no significant productivity growth. Why if density causes growth has our increasing densification led to less productivity than ever before?
Because density doesn't cause productivity. Look nationally overtime. When were our years of high productivity growth and where we building roads in the years up to it?
Chart over time national productivity, national population density, and national road usage. Lets see which is related or correlated.
Figure 1: UK productivity - what do we notice? A complete flatline in recent years, utterly unprecedented in fact. The unprecedented flatline continues past 2018.
Figure 2: UK population density - what do we notice? A major increase in recent years.
Q: Are figure 1 and figure 2 related?
A: No, they're inversely correlated in fact. Productivity was growing faster when our density was stable and has collapsed while our density has been rising.
How does that make sense? Could it be due to figure 3?
Figure 3: UK road usage - what do we notice? A major flatline in recent years.
Q: Are figure 1 and figure 3 related?
A: Yes.
The UK stopped investing in roads last century. Our population density has shot up this century, our population grown nearly a quarter, but our roads have not kept up and we've not been building them. As a result our vehicle usage has stalled, leading to productivity stalling, since as we all know 95% of freight and 90% of passenger mileage is by the road, so no extra road activity = no extra productivity.
Case comprehensively closed and proven. If you want productivity, build some roads. We're overdue decades of investment.
Who can forget the almost crystalline anticipation of waiting for the week's West Midlands mortality figures and the subsequent boldly stated assertions of clueless arseholes?
Narendra Modi has seized and politicised Indian cricket
India’s behaviour in cricket offers a sobering lesson in Indian power
The six-week-long cricket World Cup, which will see the world’s ten strongest national sides compete in the one-day format of the game, may be the richest, most watched and most overtly politicised ever held. More than 712m Indians are expected to tune in, especially if their team does well, as is predicted. Indian companies are vying for eyeballs, with unicorns such as Upstox, a fintech firm, and Dream11, a gaming one, joining old stagers such as mrf Tyres among the event’s 18 official sponsors."
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/10/04/narendra-modi-has-seized-and-politicised-indian-cricket
This government are still going for the 'net zero crap', albeit a little slower.
Aside from that, well done!
Wow. I must have been driving across fields when I imagined driving along the A14 past Huntingdon on Monday. And I must have imagined all the preparatory works for the A428 Caxton Gibbett to Black Cat upgrade.
I think the general sarcasm in the UK may prove a considerable defence against these humourless extremists.
It remains to be seen how successful GB News will be, and most of the reactionary right, when they are disconnected from power - and an awfully long way from it both politically and temporally.
I suspect Lawrence Fox will be a harbinger. They will become more and more strident, out of touch and, well, dotty.
But I actually agree - I think levels of public transport Have you sent your analysis to the OECD? Nobel prize I reckon. It was roads all along.
I now think more strongly that it will take a minimum of 2 GE defeats before they are even vying for power. Why so? Because all the evidence suggests they will have one more lurch to the right, where they will never win power and where they will look increasingly out of touch. This country will move on and will look and feel very different.
When people look back on the last 13 (14) years it will be tainted by the horrors of the past 4 years, not all of their own making of course, but that's how bad luck sometimes goes.
The Conservatives may well be out of power for a generation. But, yes, they will come back. Why? Because people like to have money and there will always be a place for a centre-right party of aspiration.
I think the trouble is that a lot of people in this country don't want any growth whatsoever but expect to be paid to be kept in clover regardless.
That's where it's breaking down.
very good!
I have seen this claim, usually from centrist dad types on twitter trying to score politics points, but I cannot see how it stands up to scrutiny.
1. Spring 2024
2. Autumn 2024
3. January 2025
The question isn't what you'd like but what you think.
2,1, 3 for me but I wouldn't discount 3, much as I hate the idea.
Although if he aims for 'de growth' given his record we'll probably have a 10% uplift in GDP.
Perhaps it's a general problem with the right. I mean if you truly believe in freedom you don't go telling people they can't express gender however they like. Or ban smoking. etc. etc.
Ontologically the right is in a mess.
(The same thing happened with the hard left a few years ago and regularly surfaces)
GB News seems to be successful among its peers but it doesn’t make money, neither does SKY News, and it is hard to see how it will.
I do agree with your initial sentence. No way back for the useless Tories now. We will be Starmers people in around 12 months and he will have a working majority.
They certainly aren’t ‘pro freedom’ like the Trump GOP.
Starmer is playing it right. The Tories are making error after a error. He is letting the get on with it.
Trends over time
In 2021, there were 247,800 miles of road in Great Britain. This was 2,800 more miles than a decade earlier in 2011 (a 1.1% increase), and 4,900 more miles than in 2001 (a 2.0% increase).
Most of this change seen over the last 20 years was due to an increase in minor roads. There were 4,200 more miles of minor road in Great Britain in 2021 than in 2001 (a 1.9% increase), almost entirely driven by an increase in ‘C’ and ‘U’ roads.
In 20 years there's been a 2% increase in roads, almost entirely made up from minor roads.
In the meantime there's been a 14% increase in our population.
So proportionately our roads have gone backwards not forwards per capita.
Compare instead with last century, when we had productivity growth from investment in infrastructure.
Autumn 2024. I'll even go for a date - 24th October 2024 - Gives Rishi exactly two years to the day as PM.
Oh, and good morning PB!
It's not so much that people don't want economic growth...
.... It's just that they don't see why they should be inconvenienced is any way at all to enable it. And the wiring between those new houses, or that tram line, or those immigrants, and growth is sometimes complex and counterintuitive enough that it can be plausibly denied. "It will see me out" is what people on the way out tend to say (my father said it a lot). It's not a good attitude when it grips a country.
I suspect Sunak's "growth" model is not dissimilar from Truss's trickle down programme. No speculate to accumulate notion from Rishi. As a hedge fund manager he knows how to grow money from failure. Canning HS2 creates an accounting sleight of hand, which the media have already moronically latched onto, of a £36b "windfall". An invisible Brucie-bonus, Rishi has twigged he can use for pre-election top down tax cuts.
Yesterday was a spectacularly sad culmination of a profoundly sad conference week. The speech was a seminal moment in Britain's decline.
Anyway back to those Labour/Lib Dem/ SNP small boat failures and the war on tofu eating wokerati liberal elites. That should generate us some growth.
I think fundamentally (and Starmer is just as bad here) there's an absence of leadership in this country.
Leadership means saying unpopular things and tackled the criticism and flak head-on, respectfully I might add, because you're trying to take people somewhere different. The point is that you will grudging respect and some new support along the way, and then much more of the country gets behind you - just a question of when.
I'd like to see more political leaders with courage and doing the right thing for the whole country. What we have instead is abdication of responsibility, cowardice and followership and loud-mouth performing on social media.
Suppose we get to September 2024 and the polls have swung back a bit, but still pointing to a bad Conservative defeat. Won't the temptation be to cling on just a little bit longer in the hope that something turns up?
Yes, the government going to the polls in Nov/Dec/Jan would be mad, but that's not an argument against them doing it. And it would fit the "uncomprehending Johnson cosplay" that Rishi S seems to be toying with.
The scuba diving remains sensational, not least coz it gets you out of the dreadful, dreary rain
It's neither novel nor alien not illogical to believe that our critical transport infrastructure is key to economic growth and development.
Hence why we built the infrastructure which unlocked economic growth in the past. Hence why others around the planet are investing in their infrastructure too.
Again, a lack of political courage in telling people they'll have to accept it - and it will become part of the landscape in time - and it's not as if doing all that won it any extra fans anyway.
Ultimately, it was part of its undoing.
It's the Education policy which is most absurd in this respect. Putting forward, without consultation of any kind, a year before an election, a fundamental reform which will take a decade to come about, is simply absurd.
Sunak appears to believe he was elected with some massive mandate to mess around with the country at his whim. He needs to recognise he's a fag end* PM who's almost certain to be ejected by an electorate which is wholly disillusioned with both him and his party.
*Possibly his only legacy.
Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Scotland, said the result has the potential to become “a launchpad” for Labour’s Westminster election campaign next year.
The scale of any victory would be seen as a key pointer to the party’s fortunes next year, with predictions of a win on a swing of more than 10 per cent, though on a relatively low turnout.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anas-sarwar-confident-of-seismic-result-in-by-election-6xvmp9zpx
The tunnels haven't actually removed any disruption instead it's ended up with massive air vents being built at multiple locations so the air can be managed...
When I say that an actual train track would be prettier and would have been less disruptive many people agree...
I seem to recall the channel tunnel went through various stages of cancellation.
Oh dear, how sad. Never mind!
And Good Morning to everyone!
It's great to have more people but for them to be productive and have good living standards they need homes and infrastructure.
Unfortunately NIMBYism and an anti-investment agenda (often cloaked under the cloth of false environmental concerns) have both stood in the way of either productivity or wage growth.
It is amazing how something as illiberal as this ban is portrayed as being a "freedom" measure. People start smoking and clearly they lose their own free will. Even though many many people have stopped quite easily.
I don't think Thatcher/Mitterand's tunnel was ever in serious risk of being cancelled? And the high-speed link, though started late, was also not cancelled.
Autumn 2024 I think as well
It has started. But really needs to purge a few loons still. There is a place for a right of centre news channel which is a little more mainstream and less "WEF are controlling us all, use only cash" types.
Mind you the more I see of the Guardian these days it is like a left wing, print, version of GB News. Or at least what GB News seems to be from social media as I don't watch it.
I suppose it could work if Tory MPs only give two centrist candidates to the membership to choose from. Mordaunt and Barclay?
And major changes generally that impact generations to come should not be rabbits out of the hat at a PMs whim making a quick decision, but be informed decisions after a proper debate and attempts to build consensus where possible.
People vary: some find it easier to give up than others. Others don’t. The majority of all smokers have tried to quit and failed. The majority of all smokers want to quit. If most people doing something don’t want to be doing it, it’s not much of a freedom!