So what's the latest pb thinking on timing of the GE? Shame we can't have a poll:
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.
I increasingly suspect Spring 2024. I don't think the Tories want another conference like this as a prelude to a GE.
Sunak won't survive another drubbing in the locals - backbenchers will remove him.
So either they wait till after that, and he's removed, or they go then.
You seriously think the Tories can change leaders? Again. In this Parliament? And who would want to take on the job facing certain defeat, anyway?
"Vote for us. We can't tell you who'll be PM this time next year, or again the year after that. And they'll probably have completely different policies to the ones we are standing on today."
Erm, can we talk about "have you ever heard anyone want to go there faster" Bradford?
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
There are quite a few problems with this analysis. As others have noted, especially around the causative side.
Instead of dwelling on those I want to highlight three areas that would improve the analysis.
Firstly, international comparisons. To the extent that you can talk about productivity flatlining (it's really not clear from the chart what's going on because the logarithmic scale flattens things at the top end. It's clear something is happening but not clear how much of something) we need to establish how that compares with other countries. Is there something specific or is something systemic happening in comparable countries? Explaining any differences in terms of differential road building would be a big step towards supporting or undermining your point.
It's in that second analysis that I think you'll run into trouble. London's high productivity growth makes me wonder a lot whether your theory is total bunk.
Thirdly, lastly, you probably need to talk about mechanisms. The broad brush idea that moving stuff around is needed for production and that if it can't move you can't produce. But what bottlenecks are there and how bad are they? Which industries are affected and by how much? If you work in finance in Edinburgh the effects of a traffic jams at Dover are probably quite distant whereas the availability of people trained in the latest software and techniques is highly relevant. The question of how bad traffic is, where, and to what effect in what sectors is necessary to establish a solid narrative for why new roads are the solution.
I think your analysis is interesting, so I won't pan it. But your claim that you've "comprehensively" proven anything is, I'm afraid, risible.
Yes, there were lots of other things which happened which coincided with productivity stalling. The iphone, for one. Politicalbetting.com, for another.
Ooh - I wasn't far off with my speculation about Euston. I sarcastically said one platform on the existing site. OK its 6, but mostly in the existing footprint.
That means two things - a huge revenue from selling off the land bulldozed for the now cancelled HS station, and the absolute cancellation of the rest of the network. Originally HS2 was to take 18 trains an hour - from 6 platforms that would mean 15 minute turnarounds of 400m trains. Which is impossible.
Happily we will have had an election before much progress is made on this.
I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about all this. Labour conference soon where SKS will commit to original plans for HS2 plus loads of extra money for inter town Northern transport. Sunak is shit at politics and the Tories are going to be annihilated at the election within a year.
Relax unless you think that the Tories might end up sneaking a win against the odds using the Brexit referendum playbook but again as Rishi is shit at politics it’s all ok and Labour will win.
Services tend to be much of a muchness, but have to admit when I got to Gloucester services a few years back it definitely felt like the start of the SW holiday.
Erm, can we talk about "have you ever heard anyone want to go there faster" Bradford?
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
I don't pretend to understand all of this but would I be wrong in summarising as: "We are cancelling HS2 and replacing it with some unicorns"?
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Services tend to be much of a muchness, but have to admit when I got to Gloucester services a few years back it definitely felt like the start of the SW holiday.
Several stand out: e.g. Tebay, Gloucester and Cairn Lodge (all owned by Westmorland, strangely enough). Most are varying shades of meh, generally the older ones are worse.
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
You’ve actually made no link between the two facts. Correlation not causation.
A major driver (heh) of the flat lining productivity was the impact of 2008 on the City. Proved a lot of the business was unsustainable/ unattractive but it was in the historical productivity stats and not since then
I have made a link between the two facts, there's a causative (not correlative) link between infrastructure and growth.
Don't believe me, ask those opposed to new roads as it will lead to "induced demand".
Want another word for "induced demand"? "Growth" 📈
Yes but is it mostly crud growth?
Suppose a wizard came along one night and moved everyone's jobs further away from their homes.
Technically, that would be more activity, more growth, but I doubt that most people would be happier as a result.
Miles driven are a means to an end (access to jobs, facilities, life) not an end in themselves. And cities provide an alternative means to that end without all the driving. Indeed, beyond a certain point, cars get in the way of civic life by taking up so much space.
Yes and no. You're entirely correct that just driving further is in itself not a good - baring classic car enthusiasts and learner drivers, not many people go out in their cars just for the sake of it.
However, lets imagine (somewhat crudely, in the style of a spherical employee in a vacuum) that the road network in my area improves so much that I can travel twice as far from my house in the same time driving. Also assuming that I don't want to move (it's an expensive hassle), there is an upper bound to how far I'm willing to commute, mostly expressed in time. So one can draw a circle on the map, expressing the area in which I'm willing to seek employment. If you were to double average road speeds in my area, that doubles the radius of the circle in which I'll be willing to work, increasing the *area* in which I'm willing to work by a factor not of 2 but of 4.
That mean four times as many potentially suitable employers. In turn, that means I'm much more likely to work for an employer where I add lots of value, and it means that more employers will be competing for my services, so my wages are likely to go up - even if I don't change employers!
Same sort of thing will apply in other fields - the less time the Amazon man spends sat in traffic and the more time putting parcels through my letter box, the less it costs Amazon to ship my cheap tat to me, and the cheaper it is.
I used to work for a firm that did a lot of site contracting work all over the country - send a bunch of lads out in a transit pickup to put some pipework in a building somewhere sort of stuff. There was a boundary line of about 2 hours driving each way where for jobs taking more than a day, it was worth putting them up in hotels. The further you can get in those two hours, the more of the country you can cover without the expense and inconvenience of putting people in hotels.
So it doesn't take a genius to see that better roads are likely to give you economic growth.
Conversely, our current policy of packing in millions more immigrants without building any extra infrastructure is very likely to have the exact opposite effect - clogged roads cost everybody money, so whilst nominal GDP may rise, the measure that's actually important in terms of most people's lives, GDP/Capita, is probably going to stall or fall.
The current, un-self reflective trend of the Guardian, and the rise of GB News, do indeed both reflect a problem in our media. The appetite for clicks and impact is crowding out the challenging or surprising middle ground, and relatively few people are willing to wait for nuance.
This is also connected to the speed of the post '90's broadcast media, and the entertainment ethos that was imported to news. Impact, reader and viewer attention, abandon complexity.
So what's the latest pb thinking on timing of the GE? Shame we can't have a poll:
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.
I increasingly suspect Spring 2024. I don't think the Tories want another conference like this as a prelude to a GE.
Don’t agree; I think we’re moving into the desperation stage comparable to Callaghan in 79 and Major in 97. January 25 has the advantage that two weeks of campaigning will be lost because of Christmas and New Year and peoples minds will be elsewhere.
January will be much worse for Sunak than October/November. No-one will want an election campaign over Christmas and most will just accuse Sunak of being a chicken and that he just wants one last Christmas in No. 10.
October seems the form horse but if the conservatives are still anywhere close to their current poll rating it will be very tempting to wait and see if something turns up.
I think next year could be grim, politically. Ever more desperate attempts to stoke a culture war here, a nasty Trump-Biden presidential contest in the Autumn possibly accompanied by insurrection of some sort, and a possible creeping abandonment of Ukraine by bored westerners putting a smile on Putin’s face.
By next autumn Trump might be in jail if his court cases go against him, I am sceptical he will be nominee. Ukraine is heading for deadlock, Putin can't get to Kyiv and Zelensky can't push the Russians out of Crimea
Did Sunak mention Ukraine at all? Or is it on the laterbase while he sorts out that sketchy section of the A1 near Worksop?
In passing, while saying we couldn't trust Starmer with the country's security.
No one's buying that. Starmer is not Corbyn and the tories thinking he is is going to utter fail
Quite. Given the strong cross party consensus on Ukraine, I thought that another of the many crass and dishonest parts of the speech.
Ooh - I wasn't far off with my speculation about Euston. I sarcastically said one platform on the existing site. OK its 6, but mostly in the existing footprint.
That means two things - a huge revenue from selling off the land bulldozed for the now cancelled HS station, and the absolute cancellation of the rest of the network. Originally HS2 was to take 18 trains an hour - from 6 platforms that would mean 15 minute turnarounds of 400m trains. Which is impossible.
Happily we will have had an election before much progress is made on this.
I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about all this. Labour conference soon where SKS will commit to original plans for HS2 plus loads of extra money for inter town Northern transport. Sunak is shit at politics and the Tories are going to be annihilated at the election within a year.
Relax unless you think that the Tories might end up sneaking a win against the odds using the Brexit referendum playbook but again as Rishi is shit at politics it’s all ok and Labour will win.
Because the Tories are going to spend the next 12 months selling off the land required for HS2 Birmingham - Manchester to scupper its chances of ever being built.
Erm, can we talk about "have you ever heard anyone want to go there faster" Bradford?
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
I don't pretend to understand all of this but would I be wrong in summarising as: "We are cancelling HS2 and replacing it with some unicorns"?
They have cancelled it. And are spending 1/3 of the savings building the most northern bit of it from Warrington to Manchester Piccadilly. This will connect with a crayon sketch called "Northern Powerhouse Rail" which will build a tunnel - which hasn't been designed or routed - across to Marsden where it will connect to the existing slow route into Huddersfield with a promised journey time of stop laughing.
They have now added a £2bn "new station for Bradford" which will connect into it and do that leg in 12 minutes. Which is a new High Speed line which again hasn't even been proposed yet.
The impressive bit is that most Tory MPs are so stupid as to not know or care that they are selling crayon drawings. The truly impressive bit is that cynical fucks who *do* know will sell them anyway because winning the election to then cancel all these plans as uncosted and impossible is definitely in the national interest.
Or - as the vice chair of the party said - who wants to go to Bradford faster?
Catching up with Mid-Beds by election news and it seems all isn't going too well with Lab-Lib pre-general election negotiations 😂
"On 21 September it was reported that Labour had issued a cease and desist letter to the Lib Dems, accusing them of publishing "lies and smears" about the Labour candidate in their election leaflets, and using a misleading bar chart showing the Lib Dems as neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, when polling put them in third place. In response the Lib Dems accused Labour of a "dirty tricks" campaign."
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
There are quite a few problems with this analysis. As others have noted, especially around the causative side.
Instead of dwelling on those I want to highlight three areas that would improve the analysis.
Firstly, international comparisons. To the extent that you can talk about productivity flatlining (it's really not clear from the chart what's going on because the logarithmic scale flattens things at the top end. It's clear something is happening but not clear how much of something) we need to establish how that compares with other countries. Is there something specific or is something systemic happening in comparable countries? Explaining any differences in terms of differential road building would be a big step towards supporting or undermining your point.
It's in that second analysis that I think you'll run into trouble. London's high productivity growth makes me wonder a lot whether your theory is total bunk.
Thirdly, lastly, you probably need to talk about mechanisms. The broad brush idea that moving stuff around is needed for production and that if it can't move you can't produce. But what bottlenecks are there and how bad are they? Which industries are affected and by how much? If you work in finance in Edinburgh the effects of a traffic jams at Dover are probably quite distant whereas the availability of people trained in the latest software and techniques is highly relevant. The question of how bad traffic is, where, and to what effect in what sectors is necessary to establish a solid narrative for why new roads are the solution.
I think your analysis is interesting, so I won't pan it. But your claim that you've "comprehensively" proven anything is, I'm afraid, risible.
I think with transport you probably want to "run your winners" - for the highest density areas that's rail, for lower density areas road investment is probably a better option.
One year to a GE and Sunak has got the country focussed on railway lines.
Taking a step back from the fire and fury tonight: is that really a very good re-election launch strategy?
As disgusted as I am, cynically it could be.
Rail just isn't that important outside of London, which is why HS2 was only ever a Londoners blueprint for what Levelling Up should mean.
If the Opposition overreacts to this then it could backfire, which is probably why Starmer is wisely keeping his cards close to his chest currently.
If Sunak wanted to be really cynical, he should slash fuel duty before the election. Would help him make his inflation target too.
This is your blind spot for all things transport.
The reason it isn't important is because it isn't available. That's what HS2 was aiming to fix.
The reason you have high levels of driving in the north-west is because you have the highest density of roads anywhere in the country.
So what you're saying is we have high levels of driving because we have the best density of roads anywhere in the country?
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.
Rishinomics from Bart Simpson, better cutting off both your legs rather than just one........DOH
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
Erm, can we talk about "have you ever heard anyone want to go there faster" Bradford?
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
As I noted earlier, on further analysis, the speech will seem far worse than it did at the time. even for those who originally bought the 'freeing up money for nice things' argument.
Like a well received budget speech after the accountants have had a week to dive into the figures.
I hadn't realised that one of Sunak's big ideas - the smoking ban - isn't even going to be whipped by the Tories (according to the BBC this morning). One wonders whether it has been agreed - or even discussed - by the Cabinet.
I believe Labour have said they'll support it, though.
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.
Both need wider debate, maybe even a Royal Commission especially for the smoking ban. We don't need PMs who think they are both the Oracle and all powerful, especially the ones who are actually weak and under threat.
Why do we need a Royal Commission on the smoking ban? We’ve known the ills of smoking for decades. We’ve known the effects of different approaches to reduce smoking for decades. Let’s make a decision.
Bollox, we are turning into a banana republic with lowlifes deciding what we can and cannot do , what will be the Tories next hobby horse. Overweight and disabled people be scared, Tories are running out of baddies.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
Erm, can we talk about "have you ever heard anyone want to go there faster" Bradford?
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
I don't pretend to understand all of this but would I be wrong in summarising as: "We are cancelling HS2 and replacing it with some unicorns"?
I think a better summary would be "We are cancelling HS2 (North) and replacing it mainly with things we had already set out plans to do in the next couple of decades (and which we can still row back on later if the trick works electorally.)". Like budgets, the devil is in the detail and the morning after the announcement looks worse. The idea that the government was planning no new major transport infrastructure spending over the next two decades other than HS2 is risible, yet they are depending on that fiction to justify the fiction that the £36bn saving is being reinvested in "additional" projects.
Tories are finished now. A new hard right party will take their place and even if the tories survive they will be the hard right party.
KGB News and the Conservatives have become Fox news and Trump GOP tribute acts respectively. It remains to be seen if there is a market for the hard right in the UK when the originals in the US seem to be in intellectual and financial meltdown.
I think the general sarcasm in the UK may prove a considerable defence against these humourless extremists.
Hard right. The Tories are hardly hard right. Or even a UKIP tribute act. If they were there wouldn’t be the smoking ban or nanny state policies, there wouldn’t be taxes at the rate they are and net inward migration wouldn’t be as high as it is now, it may be as high as a million this year, and the small boats would have been sorted.
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.
Isn't this just part of their problem though? They are politically all over the place. Some of their policies are, as you quite rightly point out, anti-freedom. I mean in my view, bizarrely so.
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)
Smoking is very anti-freedom. Nicotine is exceedingly addictive. It is as and possibly more addictive than heroin or cocaine. Once someone is hooked by smoking, they lose their freedom to a biochemical imbalance caused in the brain. Constantly craving the next cigarette is not freedom.
"Possibly" meaning no one knows
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.
“Possibly” meaning that addictiveness is hard to define and is partly socially determined rather than purely being about neurochemistry. We do know. Nicotine is one of the most researched drugs ever.
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!
So "possibly" means we don't know but anti smoking activists use an unverifiable claim to try to back up their arguments as well as all sorts of nonsensical claims about vaping "popcorn lung" for examply.
A majority May say they want to quit. What people say and what they want are often different things.
We have far fewer smokers and the numbers are declining.
Still if you think removing a freedom is giving people freedom welcome to 1984.
Be good business for the black market, they will eb able to increase prices with no competition.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
It is not planned to ever happen, merely to limit the scale of Tory losses and make things harder for Starmer.
A honeymoon election victory immediately after PM Braverman replaces Sunak could work.
The gravy train has to keep running. If it stops the game is up.
The gravy train is cancelled (North of Watford)
I believe that south of Watford it’s called a “Jus train”.
Opportune moment to remind people that "Watford" is a different place to "The Watford Gap" (of motorway services fame, between Daventry and Rugby) which is traditionally where the South East ends and the rest of the country begins.
Ketchup train south of the Watford gap, Gravy train in the Midlands and North West, Curry sauce train through Yorkshire and northwards.
For goodness sake, 60 years ago homosexuality was illegal in the UK and still is in some nations and yesterday Sunak praised gay marriage.
The trick to remember is that the Conservatives were historically very in favour of homosexuality provided it was sotto voce and within people of the right class. People got progressively less protection the further away from that position they got. That remained the case until AIDS forced the issue as closetry became less sustainable.
Incidentally, the reason why I came here today is because I'm trying to track down a quote from Margaret Thatcher about how politicians think they have done something just because they gave a speech. I figure - unsarcastically - that you would be the best person to ask.
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
There are quite a few problems with this analysis. As others have noted, especially around the causative side.
Instead of dwelling on those I want to highlight three areas that would improve the analysis.
Firstly, international comparisons. To the extent that you can talk about productivity flatlining (it's really not clear from the chart what's going on because the logarithmic scale flattens things at the top end. It's clear something is happening but not clear how much of something) we need to establish how that compares with other countries. Is there something specific or is something systemic happening in comparable countries? Explaining any differences in terms of differential road building would be a big step towards supporting or undermining your point.
It's in that second analysis that I think you'll run into trouble. London's high productivity growth makes me wonder a lot whether your theory is total bunk.
Thirdly, lastly, you probably need to talk about mechanisms. The broad brush idea that moving stuff around is needed for production and that if it can't move you can't produce. But what bottlenecks are there and how bad are they? Which industries are affected and by how much? If you work in finance in Edinburgh the effects of a traffic jams at Dover are probably quite distant whereas the availability of people trained in the latest software and techniques is highly relevant. The question of how bad traffic is, where, and to what effect in what sectors is necessary to establish a solid narrative for why new roads are the solution.
I think your analysis is interesting, so I won't pan it. But your claim that you've "comprehensively" proven anything is, I'm afraid, risible.
I've had a quick look at productivity growth at LA level, 2009 to 2019, by road density and there no discernible relationship, which suggests a lack of roads is not the primary cause of slow productivity growth.
However, you'd want to do a diff-in-diff analysis, with change in road miles compared with productivity growth. I'm not sure there have been enough new roads in that 10 or 20 year period to be able to test that properly?
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
Lets also remember that delays and alterations happen elsewhere. I did Madrid - Alicante on AVE yonks back and there were part-built connections onto future phases (to Murcia as an example). The difference is that the infrastructure was built to allow these to plug in - as we have done with various stub end bits of motorway or flared roundabout with provision for a future flyover.
Now? I assume the Tories will try and offload the land to their spiv mates at a song for an entirely coincidental donation to the party election fund. Euston will ensure major problems for more extensions, they will remove the ability to add back in flying junctions for extensions, and the fantasy island 2bNPRBradford scheme will be a helicopter link.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
Of course it's pandering to prejudice, but it's probably also popular. Never underestimate the appeal of majoritarianism when the affected minority group is not electorally significant.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
It is astonishingly hard to come up with things you can do on the railway to improve connectivity. The railways are pretty much full, and planned to within an inch of their lives. All the obvious and cheap stuff to do has already been done. It's not impossible to find new stuff like Nottingham-Leeds, but it generally takes a long, long time to first understand the demand and then understand what else needs to get out of the way to make this happen. Like, tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of professional analysis. (Not always - the Todmorden curve to allow Manchester-Burnley services was reasonably straightforward - but certainly anywhere you interact with high speed trains. Though even here it wasn't done without an awful lot of planning and consideration).
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
It is astonishingly hard to come up with things you can do on the railway to improve connectivity. The railways are pretty much full, and planned to within an inch of their lives. All the obvious and cheap stuff to do has already been done. It's not impossible to find new stuff like Nottingham-Leeds, but it generally takes a long, long time to first understand the demand and then understand what else needs to get out of the way to make this happen. Like, tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of professional analysis. (Not always - the Todmorden curve to allow Manchester-Burnley services was reasonably straightforward - but certainly anywhere you interact with high speed trains. Though even here it wasn't done without an awful lot of planning and consideration).
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
That and reduce complexity, if you want reliability.
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
I’ve seen a few interviews with Matt Gaetz, and he seems serious about balancing the budget and reducing the tax burden, rather than simply diverting the pool of Federal money to his own specific interests.
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
It is astonishingly hard to come up with things you can do on the railway to improve connectivity. The railways are pretty much full, and planned to within an inch of their lives. All the obvious and cheap stuff to do has already been done. It's not impossible to find new stuff like Nottingham-Leeds, but it generally takes a long, long time to first understand the demand and then understand what else needs to get out of the way to make this happen. Like, tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of professional analysis. (Not always - the Todmorden curve to allow Manchester-Burnley services was reasonably straightforward - but certainly anywhere you interact with high speed trains. Though even here it wasn't done without an awful lot of planning and consideration).
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
Oh, and by the way, Network Rail is a large and Byzantine organisation. "Talked to Network Rail" might be true, and "Network Rail don't know about it" might also be true. It's also true that there is a lot of stuff that Network Rail is looking at, some of which is directed by central government (e.g. find ways of achieving more capacity on corridor X).
The polling indicates that the top two public concerns are the cost of living crisis and healthcare followed by immigration and then a group of issues including housing, education and the environment. Transport is just about bottom of the pile.
So in terms of his three big new policy announcements yesterday, how many of those buttons of public concern did Sunak press yesterday? None I think. Transport is just about bottom of the pile, so a rejigging of transport infrastructure priorities won't cut it. I doubt if a public clamouring for a replacement of A-Levels was behind concerns about the state of education. Nor is a smoking ban phased in over a generation or two the reasons for concerns over healthcare, and in any case Labour has already said that it will match that policy.
Basically in what may well be his last conference speech before the general election, Sunak has announced nothing of note to address the issues that the public care about.
As a queer man, I can say that this conference scared the hell out of me and that a typical conversation amongst the queer people I know is where should they could start moving to to be safe. When that was a feeling amongst some people in the Jewish community in response to Corbyn, it was talked about a lot as disqualifying. That the front pages are cheering for much of this tripe only increases this fear.
The Conservative project seems to be about defining who is a citizen, and therefore deserving of state interest, and who isn't, and therefore deserving of state vitriol. The talking points around trans people, gender ideologists, parental rights around sex education and the idea of fake gay asylum seekers shows that the entire LGBTQ+ community is in the cross hairs. Hell, even a Conservative London Assembly member sees that (even if I put that in the "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" category of politics).
And SKS doesn't seem to be interested in protecting us either; if anything this seems to be something he's willing to agree with the Tories on...
Might I remind you that the Braverman speech mentioned women as well. You always ignore this.
I note that some gay Tory MPs (unnamed) expressed concern at her speech. But no woman MPs. Once again, it looks as if women don't matter.
The attack on fake gay asylum seekers is despicable. As I posted on here when it was first made, there were 415 asylum applications on the basis of sexual orientation in the last year for which we have figures.
There is no proposal to roll back the GRA. No party is proposing this and the Tories certainly aren't. Trans people have exactly the same legal rights as every other group with a pc in this country and the hysterical reaction to any suggestion to protect women's existing rights demeans the pro-trans movement. The only proposals to change the GRA have been made by Labour and the SNP and would make the position of women worse by removing existing rights they have. Labour has, as far as one can tell, sensibly stated that the requirement for a medical diagnosis should remain.
Incidentally, the SNP's counsel in the FWS case currently being argued before the Scottish courts stated yesterday that people without a GRC have no legal right to go into places reserved for members of the opposite sex. This is the law and I mention it because far too often people say the opposite either thorough ignorance of the law or because they believe what lobbyists come out with.
Mixed sex wards were banned in 2010 and the NHS is meant to report the number of occasions when this has been breached. The numbers of such breaches has soared under the Tories. They are once again proposing to do what they promised before, partly in response to the number of sexual assaults of patients in the NHS. This is also in line with the law - the Equality Act. Labour support this - rightly. Not permitting the breaching of women's boundaries, boundaries they are entitled to for reasons of practicality, dignity, privacy and safety, is not an attack on the rights of others - unless of course those others think they ought to have the right to breach those boundaries. But no decent person would think so, surely.
Personally, I place little store on such promises. Announcements are merely words.
As for Braverman and the attack on the HRA, I have made clear my views on that in a recent header. She called it the Criminal Rights Act. It is the Act which both Johnson and Owen Paterson relied on in their challenge to the Standards Committee and the release of WhatsApp messages. The Tory party does not do irony, among its many other failings, alas.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
You are aware that The Rebel Alliance is actually wholly owned by lobbyists for various special interests?
Turning the pork barrel over and starting from the other end isn't cutting the deficit or anything else than pork barrel politics.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
It is astonishingly hard to come up with things you can do on the railway to improve connectivity. The railways are pretty much full, and planned to within an inch of their lives. All the obvious and cheap stuff to do has already been done. It's not impossible to find new stuff like Nottingham-Leeds, but it generally takes a long, long time to first understand the demand and then understand what else needs to get out of the way to make this happen. Like, tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of professional analysis. (Not always - the Todmorden curve to allow Manchester-Burnley services was reasonably straightforward - but certainly anywhere you interact with high speed trains. Though even here it wasn't done without an awful lot of planning and consideration).
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
That and reduce complexity, if you want reliability.
Yes, and (apologies if I'm missing your point!) separating out fast and slow does a lot to reduce complexity.
But you're right: it's really really easy to run trains which are just the same service on a non-shared line, over and over again (like any given line on the London Underground or the Isle of Wight line).
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
It'd be like having a budget without the OBR consulted.... if the OBR were actually responsible for implementing the tax changes as well.
So what's the latest pb thinking on timing of the GE? Shame we can't have a poll:
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.
I increasingly suspect Spring 2024. I don't think the Tories want another conference like this as a prelude to a GE.
Don’t agree; I think we’re moving into the desperation stage comparable to Callaghan in 79 and Major in 97. January 25 has the advantage that two weeks of campaigning will be lost because of Christmas and New Year and peoples minds will be elsewhere.
There is too the risk of letters going in to the 1922 if the May elections are poor. The risk is on both sides for Sunak.
(I'd agree with Heathener that I think (2), (1), (3) is the order of most likely) Perhaps, but there is also a risk that if May's local elections are poor, Sunak could say to the back benchers, "Shut it, or I'll call an election for June." and then hang on till October (or January 25) like planned.
I must say, the December 2019 election has really thrown a spanner in the works. Previously, you basically knew when the next election was likely to be and absent a political crisis could bet accordingly. Here, we've three potential dates, all of which have strong arguments for and against.
Very exciting.
(I'm not up to date, but no mention of Ferrier's by-election today? A Labour win is important, if they want to open a path to a majority).
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
*If* the MML electrification is still going ahead, then that might save much of that twenty minutes. But yes, I fear crayons have been in heavy use.
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
No no, 20 minutes saved between Nottingham and Leeds. Which currently takes 1hr50. So 50 minutes is the promise, and that is running via Newark and Doncaster. Which takes 1h10 currently and will have *less* capacity after this proposal and the new faster Sheffield - Leeds services are added.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
It is astonishingly hard to come up with things you can do on the railway to improve connectivity. The railways are pretty much full, and planned to within an inch of their lives. All the obvious and cheap stuff to do has already been done. It's not impossible to find new stuff like Nottingham-Leeds, but it generally takes a long, long time to first understand the demand and then understand what else needs to get out of the way to make this happen. Like, tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of professional analysis. (Not always - the Todmorden curve to allow Manchester-Burnley services was reasonably straightforward - but certainly anywhere you interact with high speed trains. Though even here it wasn't done without an awful lot of planning and consideration).
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
That and reduce complexity, if you want reliability.
Yes, and (apologies if I'm missing your point!) separating out fast and slow does a lot to reduce complexity.
But you're right: it's really really easy to run trains which are just the same service on a non-shared line, over and over again (like any given line on the London Underground or the Isle of Wight line).
You get reduced complexity by separating high speed passenger rail from local and freight. Also reduce the corner gauge cracking, if you don't have anti-lock brakes on goods wagons.....
You can also reduce complexity in addition to that. Usually at the "cost" of "duplicating" track - but the reliability improvements can reduce running costs massively.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
It'd be like having a budget without the OBR consulted.... if the OBR were actually responsible for implementing the tax changes as well.
Yes in some respects I think what Sunak has just done is worse than Truss's tax (we'll figure out the spending later) plans.
Precisely the same situation with ciggies will exist in the future that exists now for people in their early/mid 40s with the ability to drive 8 ton lorries (Or not).
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Honestly you are paranoid. This country is one of the most accepting of lgbt in the world.
The polling indicates that the top two public concerns are the cost of living crisis and healthcare followed by immigration and then a group of issues including housing, education and the environment. Transport is just about bottom of the pile.
So in terms of his three big new policy announcements yesterday, how many of those buttons of public concern did Sunak press yesterday? None I think. Transport is just about bottom of the pile, so a rejigging of transport infrastructure priorities won't cut it. I doubt if a public clamouring for a replacement of A-Levels was behind concerns about the state of education. Nor is a smoking ban phased in over a generation or two the reasons for concerns over healthcare, and in any case Labour has already said that it will match that policy.
Basically in what may well be his last conference speech before the general election, Sunak has announced nothing of note to address the issues that the public care about.
This is why he's promoting the culture wars, as discussed.
He could have delivered so much more as a politician, I think, if he had some more courage to think for himself. He actually has some more empathic and intellectual skills, but has subcontracted them out to people who don't.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
Likewise, there doesn't seem to have been much consultation about the SPADS' idea of completely revamping A-Levels. I suspect that the education world will just shrug their shoulders, ignore it and wait to see what emerges the other side of the general election.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
Go on then. Let's see your Tory poster.
(Apologies to mods in advance if DA takes up the challenge)
As a queer man, I can say that this conference scared the hell out of me and that a typical conversation amongst the queer people I know is where should they could start moving to to be safe. When that was a feeling amongst some people in the Jewish community in response to Corbyn, it was talked about a lot as disqualifying. That the front pages are cheering for much of this tripe only increases this fear.
The Conservative project seems to be about defining who is a citizen, and therefore deserving of state interest, and who isn't, and therefore deserving of state vitriol. The talking points around trans people, gender ideologists, parental rights around sex education and the idea of fake gay asylum seekers shows that the entire LGBTQ+ community is in the cross hairs. Hell, even a Conservative London Assembly member sees that (even if I put that in the "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" category of politics).
And SKS doesn't seem to be interested in protecting us either; if anything this seems to be something he's willing to agree with the Tories on...
For goodness sake, 60 years ago homosexuality was illegal in the UK and still is in some nations and yesterday Sunak praised gay marriage.
Trans people might be a bit more concerned given his comments that men were not women but Starmer supports even gender conversion without medical certificate
The legally recognised ability of individuals to change gender was settled law before Sunak entered Parliament. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto made no mention of changing this. I've not checked, but I don't think there was any mention of the issue in the 2017 or 2015 manifestoes either. What is Sunak's democratic mandate here?
Indeed, arguably transitioning was considered more socially acceptable for a period of time than being LGB - it just wasn't talked about as much (partly because the piñata for bigotry was still mostly lesbians and gay men). For most of British history it essentially came down to whether or not the government functionary you met was happy to make the change for you on your documents, and the amount your doctor knew about the topic. There are numerous cases of people who essentially socially transitioned and never told anyone their assigned gender at birth and lived long happy lives.
The big legal cases that started some of these issues included a trans man who was the eldest child of an hereditary aristocrat, and the younger brother took him to court to assure he inherited the title and land over his older trans brother, and the case of that rich guy who knowingly married a trans woman and then wanted a divorce without having to pay anything so claimed in court their marriage wasn't legal as it was a "same sex" marriage not recognised in law - and the judge agreed. These are the foundations of the legal necessity for gender recognition - and self ID was essentially the de facto practice in this country with no issue until a few years ago when transphobia became the cause celeb amongst a certain subsection of very online people and reactionary middle class women.
You confuse social transition - which has always happened - with legal self-iD which has legal consequences for others. And which removes existing rights for women. And which has not been lawful.
Stonewall has been arguing since 2015 to remove all existing single sex exceptions in the Equality Act. They want to remove existing legal rights which largely benefit women. That is why so many women have fought back. There is something despicable about a movement claiming it is for human rights which seeks to remove the existing legal rights of others. It recently said that it no longer wants to do this but is still arguing to have gender replace sex in the Equality Act, which would have the same effect.
If the Scottish government wins the FWS appeal against the Haldane judgment then all single sex associations and schools will no longer be permitted. Another removal of rights from women.
There is nothing reactionary about fighting to keep the rights we have. There is sadly nothing new about fighting to do this against men who think that women should not have boundaries, should not have them respected, should not be able to say no and have that respected.
So what's the latest pb thinking on timing of the GE? Shame we can't have a poll:
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.
I increasingly suspect Spring 2024. I don't think the Tories want another conference like this as a prelude to a GE.
Don’t agree; I think we’re moving into the desperation stage comparable to Callaghan in 79 and Major in 97. January 25 has the advantage that two weeks of campaigning will be lost because of Christmas and New Year and peoples minds will be elsewhere.
There is too the risk of letters going in to the 1922 if the May elections are poor. The risk is on both sides for Sunak.
(I'd agree with Heathener that I think (2), (1), (3) is the order of most likely) Perhaps, but there is also a risk that if May's local elections are poor, Sunak could say to the back benchers, "Shut it, or I'll call an election for June." and then hang on till October (or January 25) like planned.
I must say, the December 2019 election has really thrown a spanner in the works. Previously, you basically knew when the next election was likely to be and absent a political crisis could bet accordingly. Here, we've three potential dates, all of which have strong arguments for and against.
Very exciting.
(I'm not up to date, but no mention of Ferrier's by-election today? A Labour win is important, if they want to open a path to a majority).
Sunak has to be coy about the GE date. Lacking any sort of natural authority, charisma, electoral legitimacy or political acumen, one of the few tools he can use to impose some shaky discipline on the verminous rabble of tory mps is the threat of an election to wipe them out.
That and patronage. Hence Swella, Shappsie and the Hamster in positions that are frankly ludicrous when you consider their lack-of-skillest and 10W RMS intellects.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
I’ve seen a few interviews with Matt Gaetz, and he seems serious about balancing the budget and reducing the tax burden, rather than simply diverting the pool of Federal money to his own specific interests.
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
No, you can't just "cut the federal budget in half"
What you can do is a one term plan of productivity increases. Which requires massive investment. The payoff is that government then runs cheaper. This pattern of carefully managed investment followed by cost reductions in operations has been identified as the way of building sustainable lower cost organisation many, many times.
For example, in the UK - the DVLA should be massively automated. This would take at least half a decade to get going - and probably be a decade to finish. At the end of it, it would employ many fewer people, but they would be higher skilled and paid - to run the automation and work on the edge cases that need human intervention. Such a program would cost in the hundreds of millions.
Just running round with a big axe is as stupid as the "Fire all the managers in the NHS" thing.
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
You’ve actually made no link between the two facts. Correlation not causation.
A major driver (heh) of the flat lining productivity was the impact of 2008 on the City. Proved a lot of the business was unsustainable/ unattractive but it was in the historical productivity stats and not since then
I have made a link between the two facts, there's a causative (not correlative) link between infrastructure and growth.
Don't believe me, ask those opposed to new roads as it will lead to "induced demand".
Want another word for "induced demand"? "Growth" 📈
Yes but is it mostly crud growth?
Suppose a wizard came along one night and moved everyone's jobs further away from their homes.
Technically, that would be more activity, more growth, but I doubt that most people would be happier as a result.
Miles driven are a means to an end (access to jobs, facilities, life) not an end in themselves. And cities provide an alternative means to that end without all the driving. Indeed, beyond a certain point, cars get in the way of civic life by taking up so much space.
Gdp is a massively flawed measurement. People getting cancer and using chemo drugs adds to gdp growth.
As a queer man, I can say that this conference scared the hell out of me and that a typical conversation amongst the queer people I know is where should they could start moving to to be safe. When that was a feeling amongst some people in the Jewish community in response to Corbyn, it was talked about a lot as disqualifying. That the front pages are cheering for much of this tripe only increases this fear.
The Conservative project seems to be about defining who is a citizen, and therefore deserving of state interest, and who isn't, and therefore deserving of state vitriol. The talking points around trans people, gender ideologists, parental rights around sex education and the idea of fake gay asylum seekers shows that the entire LGBTQ+ community is in the cross hairs. Hell, even a Conservative London Assembly member sees that (even if I put that in the "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" category of politics).
And SKS doesn't seem to be interested in protecting us either; if anything this seems to be something he's willing to agree with the Tories on...
For goodness sake, 60 years ago homosexuality was illegal in the UK and still is in some nations and yesterday Sunak praised gay marriage.
Trans people might be a bit more concerned given his comments that men were not women but Starmer supports even gender conversion without medical certificate
The legally recognised ability of individuals to change gender was settled law before Sunak entered Parliament. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto made no mention of changing this. I've not checked, but I don't think there was any mention of the issue in the 2017 or 2015 manifestoes either. What is Sunak's democratic mandate here?
He is not proposing any change to the law.
It is the trans lobbyists who want to water down the Equality Act to remove existing rights for women. Fortunately Labour seems to be having second thoughts.
As a queer man, I can say that this conference scared the hell out of me and that a typical conversation amongst the queer people I know is where should they could start moving to to be safe. When that was a feeling amongst some people in the Jewish community in response to Corbyn, it was talked about a lot as disqualifying. That the front pages are cheering for much of this tripe only increases this fear.
The Conservative project seems to be about defining who is a citizen, and therefore deserving of state interest, and who isn't, and therefore deserving of state vitriol. The talking points around trans people, gender ideologists, parental rights around sex education and the idea of fake gay asylum seekers shows that the entire LGBTQ+ community is in the cross hairs. Hell, even a Conservative London Assembly member sees that (even if I put that in the "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" category of politics).
And SKS doesn't seem to be interested in protecting us either; if anything this seems to be something he's willing to agree with the Tories on...
Might I remind you that the Braverman speech mentioned women as well. You always ignore this.
I note that some gay Tory MPs (unnamed) expressed concern at her speech. But no woman MPs. Once again, it looks as if women don't matter.
The attack on fake gay asylum seekers is despicable. As I posted on here when it was first made, there were 415 asylum applications on the basis of sexual orientation in the last year for which we have figures.
There is no proposal to roll back the GRA. No party is proposing this and the Tories certainly aren't. Trans people have exactly the same legal rights as every other group with a pc in this country and the hysterical reaction to any suggestion to protect women's existing rights demeans the pro-trans movement. The only proposals to change the GRA have been made by Labour and the SNP and would make the position of women worse by removing existing rights they have. Labour has, as far as one can tell, sensibly stated that the requirement for a medical diagnosis should remain.
Incidentally, the SNP's counsel in the FWS case currently being argued before the Scottish courts stated yesterday that people without a GRC have no legal right to go into places reserved for members of the opposite sex. This is the law and I mention it because far too often people say the opposite either thorough ignorance of the law or because they believe what lobbyists come out with.
Mixed sex wards were banned in 2010 and the NHS is meant to report the number of occasions when this has been breached. The numbers of such breaches has soared under the Tories. They are once again proposing to do what they promised before, partly in response to the number of sexual assaults of patients in the NHS. This is also in line with the law - the Equality Act. Labour support this - rightly. Not permitting the breaching of women's boundaries, boundaries they are entitled to for reasons of practicality, dignity, privacy and safety, is not an attack on the rights of others - unless of course those others think they ought to have the right to breach those boundaries. But no decent person would think so, surely.
Personally, I place little store on such promises. Announcements are merely words.
As for Braverman and the attack on the HRA, I have made clear my views on that in a recent header. She called it the Criminal Rights Act. It is the Act which both Johnson and Owen Paterson relied on in their challenge to the Standards Committee and the release of WhatsApp messages. The Tory party does not do irony, among its many other failings, alas.
Whenever I point out that cis women and especially lesbians are the most trans accepting group, and that the group who suffer most from the policing of trans bodies will be cis women and butch lesbians you always just hand wave it away. When I mention the links between the forced birth movement and anti trans movement people like yourself ignore it. Being an anti trans bigot is not being pro women - it is a reactionary movement amongst a minority of women and a load of cis men.
Trans people have been on the wards that have been congruent to their gender all my life - if it was an issue I think we would have known before this culture war started. If trans people are put on wards according to their assignment at birth you will be outing them to other patients, making them vulnerable, and you will make them less likely to come forward for healthcare. Not only that, but you will have patients question the cisness of people who just aren't cis enough - as has increasingly been the case in toilets and changing facilities and sports; stories I have shared here and you have waved away.
We have multiple reports that link the rising violence against LGBTQ+ people to the increasingly hostile rhetoric against transgender people. Why is that? Because the "logic" of the oppression is the same - in heteronormative patriarchy a gay man is "not a real man" and a lesbian "is not a real woman" because we do not procreate or perform to gender norms of masculinity and femininity. Most queer people know this because we experience it all the goddamn time.
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Honestly you are paranoid. This country is one of the most accepting of lgbt in the world.
Both can be true. We are one of the most accepting countries in the world, but there is still more to do, and plenty of minorities feel under threat at times.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Honestly you are paranoid. This country is one of the most accepting of lgbt in the world.
Anecdotally, I remember at university getting the odd person looking at me funny or making comments when holding hands with a male presenting partner. That was happening less frequently. It has increased in the last few years. And, again anecdotally, my queer friends are seeing the same.
Precisely the same situation with ciggies will exist in the future that exists now for people in their early/mid 40s with the ability to drive 8 ton lorries (Or not).
Except that driving 8 ton lorries is really useful, and the main result of the ban has been to spawn a whole generation of blokes driving overloaded 3.5T pickups (my personal best was discovering I'd delivered a 6 ton load to Scunthorpe Steelworks on a Transit rated to carry 1850kg - I'd been told it was a 2T load, turned out each of the three cases was 2T each - I had thought it felt heavier than that when driving!).
Smoking fags is usually something not very enjoyable, taken up to "fit in", but which people then can't get out of, thanks to addiction. I'm not generally a believer in banning things, but banning smoking is more sane than lots of other things we ban...
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
Bit odd how the students have US universities (U Kentucky & Purdue) tops on in Truro though.
I've asked my daughters why US University logos are in fashion here because they are buying this kind of stuff. Apparently they just are, for some. Same with stuff about New York and California.
The ways of fashion are strange.
A LOL, not long ago, was a TikTok influencer proclaiming that "Metallic" t-shirts were the next Big Thing.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
I’ve seen a few interviews with Matt Gaetz, and he seems serious about balancing the budget and reducing the tax burden, rather than simply diverting the pool of Federal money to his own specific interests.
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
So you can halve social security and medical spending and "no one will notice" ? You are about as 'serious' as Matt Gaetz.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
As a queer man, I can say that this conference scared the hell out of me and that a typical conversation amongst the queer people I know is where should they could start moving to to be safe. When that was a feeling amongst some people in the Jewish community in response to Corbyn, it was talked about a lot as disqualifying. That the front pages are cheering for much of this tripe only increases this fear.
The Conservative project seems to be about defining who is a citizen, and therefore deserving of state interest, and who isn't, and therefore deserving of state vitriol. The talking points around trans people, gender ideologists, parental rights around sex education and the idea of fake gay asylum seekers shows that the entire LGBTQ+ community is in the cross hairs. Hell, even a Conservative London Assembly member sees that (even if I put that in the "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" category of politics).
And SKS doesn't seem to be interested in protecting us either; if anything this seems to be something he's willing to agree with the Tories on...
For goodness sake, 60 years ago homosexuality was illegal in the UK and still is in some nations and yesterday Sunak praised gay marriage.
Trans people might be a bit more concerned given his comments that men were not women but Starmer supports even gender conversion without medical certificate
The legally recognised ability of individuals to change gender was settled law before Sunak entered Parliament. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto made no mention of changing this. I've not checked, but I don't think there was any mention of the issue in the 2017 or 2015 manifestoes either. What is Sunak's democratic mandate here?
Indeed, arguably transitioning was considered more socially acceptable for a period of time than being LGB - it just wasn't talked about as much (partly because the piñata for bigotry was still mostly lesbians and gay men). For most of British history it essentially came down to whether or not the government functionary you met was happy to make the change for you on your documents, and the amount your doctor knew about the topic. There are numerous cases of people who essentially socially transitioned and never told anyone their assigned gender at birth and lived long happy lives.
The big legal cases that started some of these issues included a trans man who was the eldest child of an hereditary aristocrat, and the younger brother took him to court to assure he inherited the title and land over his older trans brother, and the case of that rich guy who knowingly married a trans woman and then wanted a divorce without having to pay anything so claimed in court their marriage wasn't legal as it was a "same sex" marriage not recognised in law - and the judge agreed. These are the foundations of the legal necessity for gender recognition - and self ID was essentially the de facto practice in this country with no issue until a few years ago when transphobia became the cause celeb amongst a certain subsection of very online people and reactionary middle class women.
You confuse social transition - which has always happened - with legal self-iD which has legal consequences for others. And which removes existing rights for women. And which has not been lawful.
Stonewall has been arguing since 2015 to remove all existing single sex exceptions in the Equality Act. They want to remove existing legal rights which largely benefit women. That is why so many women have fought back. There is something despicable about a movement claiming it is for human rights which seeks to remove the existing legal rights of others. It recently said that it no longer wants to do this but is still arguing to have gender replace sex in the Equality Act, which would have the same effect.
If the Scottish government wins the FWS appeal against the Haldane judgment then all single sex associations and schools will no longer be permitted. Another removal of rights from women.
There is nothing reactionary about fighting to keep the rights we have. There is sadly nothing new about fighting to do this against men who think that women should not have boundaries, should not have them respected, should not be able to say no and have that respected.
People who used to socially transition and hid their assigned gender were treated as their gender presentation - trans people used to move away from where they grew up, to somewhere no one knew them, and typically just started self IDing and living their life - using the facilities that coincided with how they ID if potentially with more discretion to not out themselves. You and I have almost certainly been in a public toilet with a trans person and not known. It has never been a problem, and it isn't a problem.
Precisely the same situation with ciggies will exist in the future that exists now for people in their early/mid 40s with the ability to drive 8 ton lorries (Or not).
Except that driving 8 ton lorries is really useful, and the main result of the ban has been to spawn a whole generation of blokes driving overloaded 3.5T pickups (my personal best was discovering I'd delivered a 6 ton load to Scunthorpe Steelworks on a Transit rated to carry 1850kg - I'd been told it was a 2T load, turned out each of the three cases was 2T each - I had thought it felt heavier than that when driving!).
Smoking fags is usually something not very enjoyable, taken up to "fit in", but which people then can't get out of, thanks to addiction. I'm not generally a believer in banning things, but banning smoking is more sane than lots of other things we ban...
Are you just under the cut off like me ? & yes that's my point it is potentially useful !
Back in the late 90s obviously we were too young to drive, but I passed in 1998 but have less rights than @Sandpit who passed in 1996 I think. One of those - oh it's ok kids can't drive huge lorries but 26 years later those "kids" are in their early 40s...
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
Hang on. They're going to do something exciting on the Midland Main Line. Apparently the current London <> Nottingham trains will extend to Leeds via Newark, with Notts - Dirty in 50 mins. I assume a new curve to connect the Nottingham - Lincoln line to the ECML. But Leeds - Newark Northgate takes 55 minutes, and Nottingham - Newark Castle c. 15 minutes.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Any journalist worth their salt should be checking Christian Wolmar's claim that Network Rail were not consulted. It's absolutely nuts to have such a huge project scrapped and replaced by something a few SPADs have blue-skied over a couple of bottles of wine.
Likewise, there doesn't seem to have been much consultation about the SPADS' idea of completely revamping A-Levels. I suspect that the education world will just shrug their shoulders, ignore it and wait to see what emerges the other side of the general election.
It did feel like his next announcement would be in support of "quiet bat people".
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
I’ve seen a few interviews with Matt Gaetz, and he seems serious about balancing the budget and reducing the tax burden, rather than simply diverting the pool of Federal money to his own specific interests.
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
So you can halve social security and medical spending and "no one will notice" ? You are about as 'serious' as Matt Gaetz.
The notion that you could take $900bn+ out of the annual defence budget with zero effect is also a bit of a stretch.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
A honeymoon election victory immediately after PM Braverman replaces Sunak could work.
The gravy train has to keep running. If it stops the game is up.
The gravy train is cancelled (North of Watford)
I believe that south of Watford it’s called a “Jus train”.
Opportune moment to remind people that "Watford" is a different place to "The Watford Gap" (of motorway services fame, between Daventry and Rugby) which is traditionally where the South East ends and the rest of the country begins.
Ketchup train south of the Watford gap, Gravy train in the Midlands and North West, Curry sauce train through Yorkshire and northwards.
So what's the latest pb thinking on timing of the GE? Shame we can't have a poll:
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.
I increasingly suspect Spring 2024. I don't think the Tories want another conference like this as a prelude to a GE.
Don’t agree; I think we’re moving into the desperation stage comparable to Callaghan in 79 and Major in 97. January 25 has the advantage that two weeks of campaigning will be lost because of Christmas and New Year and peoples minds will be elsewhere.
There is too the risk of letters going in to the 1922 if the May elections are poor. The risk is on both sides for Sunak.
(I'd agree with Heathener that I think (2), (1), (3) is the order of most likely) Perhaps, but there is also a risk that if May's local elections are poor, Sunak could say to the back benchers, "Shut it, or I'll call an election for June." and then hang on till October (or January 25) like planned.
I must say, the December 2019 election has really thrown a spanner in the works. Previously, you basically knew when the next election was likely to be and absent a political crisis could bet accordingly. Here, we've three potential dates, all of which have strong arguments for and against.
Very exciting.
(I'm not up to date, but no mention of Ferrier's by-election today? A Labour win is important, if they want to open a path to a majority).
Sunak has to be coy about the GE date. Lacking any sort of natural authority, charisma, electoral legitimacy or political acumen, one of the few tools he can use to impose some shaky discipline on the verminous rabble of tory mps is the threat of an election to wipe them out.
That and patronage. Hence Swella, Shappsie and the Hamster in positions that are frankly ludicrous when you consider their lack-of-skillest and 10W RMS intellects.
Precisely the same situation with ciggies will exist in the future that exists now for people in their early/mid 40s with the ability to drive 8 ton lorries (Or not).
Except that driving 8 ton lorries is really useful, and the main result of the ban has been to spawn a whole generation of blokes driving overloaded 3.5T pickups (my personal best was discovering I'd delivered a 6 ton load to Scunthorpe Steelworks on a Transit rated to carry 1850kg - I'd been told it was a 2T load, turned out each of the three cases was 2T each - I had thought it felt heavier than that when driving!).
Smoking fags is usually something not very enjoyable, taken up to "fit in", but which people then can't get out of, thanks to addiction. I'm not generally a believer in banning things, but banning smoking is more sane than lots of other things we ban...
Are you just under the cut off like me ? & yes that's my point it is potentially useful !
Back in the late 90s obviously we were too young to drive, but I passed in 1998 but have less rights than @Sandpit who passed in 1996 I think. One of those - oh it's ok kids can't drive huge lorries but 26 years later those "kids" are in their early 40s...
Yes I passed my test in 1995, and can drive 7.5t trucks, those who passed after a certain point in 1996 are restricted to 3.5t.
The change was as a result of an EU directive aimed at commercial drivers, but has caught up a lot of people who want to rent a van to move house, or carry various sporting equipment on a trailer.
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
That's hilarious! And accidentally plays into the theme of the week that Sunak and his fellow travellers seem to be living in some parallel US political universe.
I did miss the university of Kentucky shirts on first glance. But now they look so American, with Sunak rather poorly photoshopped in 😂
Why is it so shit? I don't do it for a living and I am, quite literally, 100x better at Photoshop than whoever did this.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
The other thing, is that if railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren't going to get lots of railways.
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
The next few weeks in US politics are going to be fascinating. Can the small group of Republican rebels in the House, actually get regular Americans talking about inefficiency and waste in government procurement, and abolish the endless continuation bills sponsored by the best lobbyists money can buy?
No, because they're not actually bothered about that. They're bothered about giving the rich even more money.
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
I’ve seen a few interviews with Matt Gaetz, and he seems serious about balancing the budget and reducing the tax burden, rather than simply diverting the pool of Federal money to his own specific interests.
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
So you can halve social security and medical spending and "no one will notice" ? You are about as 'serious' as Matt Gaetz.
The notion that you could take $900bn+ out of the annual defence budget with zero effect is also a bit of a stretch.
Or indeed stop paying interest on government debt.
Twats like Gaetz are cynical bullshitters, and wholly destructive of the political process.
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Honestly you are paranoid. This country is one of the most accepting of lgbt in the world.
Anecdotally, I remember at university getting the odd person looking at me funny or making comments when holding hands with a male presenting partner. That was happening less frequently. It has increased in the last few years. And, again anecdotally, my queer friends are seeing the same.
And my gay daughter is seeing exactly the opposite. Needless to say I trust her opinion more than yours.
Precisely the same situation with ciggies will exist in the future that exists now for people in their early/mid 40s with the ability to drive 8 ton lorries (Or not).
Except that driving 8 ton lorries is really useful, and the main result of the ban has been to spawn a whole generation of blokes driving overloaded 3.5T pickups (my personal best was discovering I'd delivered a 6 ton load to Scunthorpe Steelworks on a Transit rated to carry 1850kg - I'd been told it was a 2T load, turned out each of the three cases was 2T each - I had thought it felt heavier than that when driving!).
Smoking fags is usually something not very enjoyable, taken up to "fit in", but which people then can't get out of, thanks to addiction. I'm not generally a believer in banning things, but banning smoking is more sane than lots of other things we ban...
Are you just under the cut off like me ? & yes that's my point it is potentially useful !
Back in the late 90s obviously we were too young to drive, but I passed in 1998 but have less rights than @Sandpit who passed in 1996 I think. One of those - oh it's ok kids can't drive huge lorries but 26 years later those "kids" are in their early 40s...
Yes I passed my test in 1995, and can drive 7.5t trucks, those who passed after a certain point in 1996 are restricted to 3.5t.
The change was as a result of an EU directive aimed at commercial drivers, but has caught up a lot of people who want to rent a van to move house, or carry various sporting equipment on a trailer.
I'd have it as an allowance for drivers who have passed at least 5 years & are over 25 (Insurance probably sees to that anyway tbh). You DO want some experience before being allowed to drive something a bit larger imo. As I've said before I remain a rejoiner but whilst we're out (And we are out) we should change things like this.
Perhaps the "may" in this will provide a defence ? ..But it now looks like she may go down for very different reasons...
And he should be done for wasting police time. Or the police should ever so politely tell him to f*** off.
There are things that are important for them to investigate and there are things that are not. A comment by a no mark politician to an empty hall is not one of them.
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
You’ve actually made no link between the two facts. Correlation not causation.
A major driver (heh) of the flat lining productivity was the impact of 2008 on the City. Proved a lot of the business was unsustainable/ unattractive but it was in the historical productivity stats and not since then
Bart's attempts at establishing causation remind me of the Pastafarian linkage between climate change and pirates. It is an uncannily close match but is, of course, utter rubbish - which is the whole point.
The idea that there is no link between infrastructure and growth is what is utter rubbish.
Of course people know that, which is why they bitch and whine about growth, under the name induced demand.
Infrastructure leads to growth, causation not correlation.
Infrastructure is not just roads. Indeed no matter how much you try and claim otherwise roads are not even the majority of infrastructure.
If your claims had any basis in fact at all then we would be seeing perpetual traffic jams on the motorways and A roads. Of course most of the traffic jams on the main roads are caused by roadworks and improvement schemes.
Bit surprised Rutherglen isn't getting more coverage here today, and hasn't had that much media coverage previously.
In some ways, it's the most important by-election of this Parliament, or at least it is in terms of betting on the outcome of the next General Election.
I'm going to say Labour by 4k, although I don't have any real insight into it.
3 charts to comprehensively prove once and for all that I am right and Eabhal is wrong.
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.
You’ve actually made no link between the two facts. Correlation not causation.
A major driver (heh) of the flat lining productivity was the impact of 2008 on the City. Proved a lot of the business was unsustainable/ unattractive but it was in the historical productivity stats and not since then
I have made a link between the two facts, there's a causative (not correlative) link between infrastructure and growth.
Don't believe me, ask those opposed to new roads as it will lead to "induced demand".
Want another word for "induced demand"? "Growth" 📈
Growth in number of car journeys =/= economic growth
I was somewhat concerned by Rishi's statement 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman' and the motivation behind it. Sounds like pandering to prejudice to me.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
To stoke bigotry, duh.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
Honestly you are paranoid. This country is one of the most accepting of lgbt in the world.
Anecdotally, I remember at university getting the odd person looking at me funny or making comments when holding hands with a male presenting partner. That was happening less frequently. It has increased in the last few years. And, again anecdotally, my queer friends are seeing the same.
And my gay daughter is seeing exactly the opposite. Needless to say I trust her opinion more than yours.
I'm happy that is the case for your daughter - but the data are suggestive of things going backwards.
Comments
Doesn't sound like a winning pitch.
£2bn for a new station. Good, doing what exactly? Apparently they will be building a spur from Huddersfield to Bratford with a journey time of 12 minutes. The journey time between Bradford and Manchester will be 30 minutes. Which means c. 17 minutes Huddersfield to Manchester.
Scratchy head time. The curtailed NPR plan has a tunnel from "Manchester" to Marsden and then an upgrade of the existing lines into Huddersfield. The quoted journey times were widely ridiculed at the time as being nonsensical and they are back.
And its "Manchester" because an exact plan for "Manchester" hadn't been remotely agreed which makes the proposed journey time of c 10 minutes Manchester to Marsden as a bit exciting. Not that "Manchester" gets built as it is the now cancelled HS2 scheme. Yes they have promised £dollah for Wazza - Manchester but again that plan was HS2.
Supposedly they have saved £36bn by "cancelling" 2a and 2b. But £12bn of that goes to build 2b anyway as its needed for the fantasy tunnel to Bratford. And they're spending £lots several times over as has been discussed. And the Bratford billion pound station will open in the 2040s.
Vote Conservative apparently, if you like crayon drawings which is all these "plans" are. Unless HY can give me the details of the Mcr NW Quadrant scheme which has just been approved. What - specifically - has been approved?
Ah well. People like getting wet and blarped at by traffic as they try and walk there. Its fun and definitely 21st century best in class.
Relax unless you think that the Tories might end up sneaking a win against the odds using the Brexit referendum playbook but again as Rishi is shit at politics it’s all ok and Labour will win.
So we need to save 20 minutes. On lines which already don't have spare capacity or actual proposals to add more or speed them up. And remember that the new fast Sheffield - Leeds services are being rerouted from the Barnsley route to Wakevegas Westgate. So even more trains on that route which means slower running than now.
In other words this is crayon fantasies. And I assume that the MML gets more services as a result. Fab! Which London terminus? St Pancras has 4 platforms which already can barely cope...
Can't drive a car down it (or land a helicopter on it). Into the bin.
Then there is Hartshead Moor.
However, lets imagine (somewhat crudely, in the style of a spherical employee in a vacuum) that the road network in my area improves so much that I can travel twice as far from my house in the same time driving. Also assuming that I don't want to move (it's an expensive hassle), there is an upper bound to how far I'm willing to commute, mostly expressed in time. So one can draw a circle on the map, expressing the area in which I'm willing to seek employment. If you were to double average road speeds in my area, that doubles the radius of the circle in which I'll be willing to work, increasing the *area* in which I'm willing to work by a factor not of 2 but of 4.
That mean four times as many potentially suitable employers. In turn, that means I'm much more likely to work for an employer where I add lots of value, and it means that more employers will be competing for my services, so my wages are likely to go up - even if I don't change employers!
Same sort of thing will apply in other fields - the less time the Amazon man spends sat in traffic and the more time putting parcels through my letter box, the less it costs Amazon to ship my cheap tat to me, and the cheaper it is.
I used to work for a firm that did a lot of site contracting work all over the country - send a bunch of lads out in a transit pickup to put some pipework in a building somewhere sort of stuff. There was a boundary line of about 2 hours driving each way where for jobs taking more than a day, it was worth putting them up in hotels. The further you can get in those two hours, the more of the country you can cover without the expense and inconvenience of putting people in hotels.
So it doesn't take a genius to see that better roads are likely to give you economic growth.
Conversely, our current policy of packing in millions more immigrants without building any extra infrastructure is very likely to have the exact opposite effect - clogged roads cost everybody money, so whilst nominal GDP may rise, the measure that's actually important in terms of most people's lives, GDP/Capita, is probably going to stall or fall.
This is also connected to the speed of the post '90's broadcast media, and the entertainment ethos that was imported to news. Impact, reader and viewer attention, abandon complexity.
Given the strong cross party consensus on Ukraine, I thought that another of the many crass and dishonest parts of the speech.
They have now added a £2bn "new station for Bradford" which will connect into it and do that leg in 12 minutes. Which is a new High Speed line which again hasn't even been proposed yet.
The impressive bit is that most Tory MPs are so stupid as to not know or care that they are selling crayon drawings. The truly impressive bit is that cynical fucks who *do* know will sell them anyway because winning the election to then cancel all these plans as uncosted and impossible is definitely in the national interest.
Or - as the vice chair of the party said - who wants to go to Bradford faster?
"On 21 September it was reported that Labour had issued a cease and desist letter to the Lib Dems, accusing them of publishing "lies and smears" about the Labour candidate in their election leaflets, and using a misleading bar chart showing the Lib Dems as neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, when polling put them in third place. In response the Lib Dems accused Labour of a "dirty tricks" campaign."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Mid_Bedfordshire_by-election
Or, in other words, the government is lying.
Like a well received budget speech after the accountants have had a week to dive into the figures.
Over the years, I have seen claims that one of the reasons some of our infrastructure projects cost more than European ones is that we measure things differently. For us, a large project such as Crossrail or HS2 is a full project, with line, stations and everything else included. Apparently in France and Germany, the line itself is the project. The stations, preparatory works (demolitions), and the line itself are all separate projects, with separate budgets. Which can make sense, and allows better integration of local projects.
I've seen this many times, including from people who should know, and it would be interesting to know if it is the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/04/hs2-rishi-sunaks-36bn-in-transport-funding-is-it-new-or-just-repackaged
While the "but we must pay to get railways, because they are great" argument holds, it does so only to a certain point.
There is a system in public contracts that "special inflation" applies. So costs go up, year on year, faster than regular inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider - a case where the spend exceeded the support. Because the only way to get the votes to back it was to use the project to spread pork. Which ballooned the project faster than votes came in for it on Congress.
It is - as so many of their policies are - a small child's crayon drawing.
https://x.com/ledburygas/status/1709823993212031427?s=46&t=2iv1prQ4P8HyMrM-UX0Dig
“Mate you need to tell your photoshop team to bear in mind that when they search for stock images, "UK" also stands for University of Kentucky”
Ketchup train south of the Watford gap, Gravy train in the Midlands and North West, Curry sauce train through Yorkshire and northwards.
Incidentally, the reason why I came here today is because I'm trying to track down a quote from Margaret Thatcher about how politicians think they have done something just because they gave a speech. I figure - unsarcastically - that you would be the best person to ask.
However, you'd want to do a diff-in-diff analysis, with change in road miles compared with productivity growth. I'm not sure there have been enough new roads in that 10 or 20 year period to be able to test that properly?
*I've checked excluding London too.
Now? I assume the Tories will try and offload the land to their spiv mates at a song for an entirely coincidental donation to the party election fund. Euston will ensure major problems for more extensions, they will remove the ability to add back in flying junctions for extensions, and the fantasy island 2bNPRBradford scheme will be a helicopter link.
For the vast majority of us this is true, but for a small minority it is not physically certain and for another small minority emotionally not true and with the exception of many sports (a pretty impossible dilemma) and toilets/changing room (a solvable dilemma) and some bureaucracy it doesn't matter two hoots whether someone considers themselves male or female.
Worse to me is the motivation of saying it. He wouldn't say, for instance 'men and women are straight', just because most are would he, nor would he say 'people are white', because most here are? So why say it?
I also like the idea that these republican 'rebels' are in no way in hock to lobbyists and money...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/66854204
Of course, this planning and consideration is always going on. There are a lot of people whose job it is to try to find opportunities to make rail better. Largely, what they concluded some time ago, was that you need to try to separate high speed trains out onto their own network. This then frees up capacity for, if you want, to run semi-fasts from Nottingham to Leeds.
Again, the kind of rhetoric and potential policy outcomes this government is proposing for LGBTQ+ people is extremely concerning and has lots of queer people questioning whether this country is somewhere safe to be. And of course, for most people, even if this country isn't safe we don't have the means to leave. We know where this goes - this reactionary tendency is one that demands a strict gender binary and strict adherence to it; this may start with legal restrictions on trans people, but will include all LGBTQ+ people and will extend to cis people who are just not cis enough...
We’ve discussed things like the Senate Launch System vs SpaceX on here many times, and how the amount of pork and lobbying has got so far out of hand, that most of the Federal budget could be cut in half and no-one would actually notice. It’s rather like HS2 in that regard.
So in terms of his three big new policy announcements yesterday, how many of those buttons of public concern did Sunak press yesterday? None I think. Transport is just about bottom of the pile, so a rejigging of transport infrastructure priorities won't cut it. I doubt if a public clamouring for a replacement of A-Levels was behind concerns about the state of education. Nor is a smoking ban phased in over a generation or two the reasons for concerns over healthcare, and in any case Labour has already said that it will match that policy.
Basically in what may well be his last conference speech before the general election, Sunak has announced nothing of note to address the issues that the public care about.
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-1-october-2023/
I note that some gay Tory MPs (unnamed) expressed concern at her speech. But no woman MPs. Once again, it looks as if women don't matter.
The attack on fake gay asylum seekers is despicable. As I posted on here when it was first made, there were 415 asylum applications on the basis of sexual orientation in the last year for which we have figures.
There is no proposal to roll back the GRA. No party is proposing this and the Tories certainly aren't. Trans people have exactly the same legal rights as every other group with a pc in this country and the hysterical reaction to any suggestion to protect women's existing rights demeans the pro-trans movement. The only proposals to change the GRA have been made by Labour and the SNP and would make the position of women worse by removing existing rights they have. Labour has, as far as one can tell, sensibly stated that the requirement for a medical diagnosis should remain.
Incidentally, the SNP's counsel in the FWS case currently being argued before the Scottish courts stated yesterday that people without a GRC have no legal right to go into places reserved for members of the opposite sex. This is the law and I mention it because far too often people say the opposite either thorough ignorance of the law or because they believe what lobbyists come out with.
Mixed sex wards were banned in 2010 and the NHS is meant to report the number of occasions when this has been breached. The numbers of such breaches has soared under the Tories. They are once again proposing to do what they promised before, partly in response to the number of sexual assaults of patients in the NHS. This is also in line with the law - the Equality Act. Labour support this - rightly. Not permitting the breaching of women's boundaries, boundaries they are entitled to for reasons of practicality, dignity, privacy and safety, is not an attack on the rights of others - unless of course those others think they ought to have the right to breach those boundaries. But no decent person would think so, surely.
Personally, I place little store on such promises. Announcements are merely words.
As for Braverman and the attack on the HRA, I have made clear my views on that in a recent header. She called it the Criminal Rights Act. It is the Act which both Johnson and Owen Paterson relied on in their challenge to the Standards Committee and the release of WhatsApp messages. The Tory party does not do irony, among its many other failings, alas.
Turning the pork barrel over and starting from the other end isn't cutting the deficit or anything else than pork barrel politics.
But you're right: it's really really easy to run trains which are just the same service on a non-shared line, over and over again (like any given line on the London Underground or the Isle of Wight line).
Perhaps, but there is also a risk that if May's local elections are poor, Sunak could say to the back benchers, "Shut it, or I'll call an election for June." and then hang on till October (or January 25) like planned.
I must say, the December 2019 election has really thrown a spanner in the works. Previously, you basically knew when the next election was likely to be and absent a political crisis could bet accordingly. Here, we've three potential dates, all of which have strong arguments for and against.
Very exciting.
(I'm not up to date, but no mention of Ferrier's by-election today? A Labour win is important, if they want to open a path to a majority).
You can also reduce complexity in addition to that. Usually at the "cost" of "duplicating" track - but the reliability improvements can reduce running costs massively.
He could have delivered so much more as a politician, I think, if he had some more courage to think for himself. He actually has some more empathic and intellectual skills, but has subcontracted them out to people who don't.
(Apologies to mods in advance if DA takes up the challenge)
Stonewall has been arguing since 2015 to remove all existing single sex exceptions in the Equality Act. They want to remove existing legal rights which largely benefit women. That is why so many women have fought back. There is something despicable about a movement claiming it is for human rights which seeks to remove the existing legal rights of others. It recently said that it no longer wants to do this but is still arguing to have gender replace sex in the Equality Act, which would have the same effect.
If the Scottish government wins the FWS appeal against the Haldane judgment then all single sex associations and schools will no longer be permitted. Another removal of rights from women.
There is nothing reactionary about fighting to keep the rights we have. There is sadly nothing new about fighting to do this against men who think that women should not have boundaries, should not have them respected, should not be able to say no and have that respected.
That and patronage. Hence Swella, Shappsie and the Hamster in positions that are frankly ludicrous when you consider their lack-of-skillest and 10W RMS intellects.
What you can do is a one term plan of productivity increases. Which requires massive investment. The payoff is that government then runs cheaper. This pattern of carefully managed investment followed by cost reductions in operations has been identified as the way of building sustainable lower cost organisation many, many times.
For example, in the UK - the DVLA should be massively automated. This would take at least half a decade to get going - and probably be a decade to finish. At the end of it, it would employ many fewer people, but they would be higher skilled and paid - to run the automation and work on the edge cases that need human intervention. Such a program would cost in the hundreds of millions.
Just running round with a big axe is as stupid as the "Fire all the managers in the NHS" thing.
It is the trans lobbyists who want to water down the Equality Act to remove existing rights for women. Fortunately Labour seems to be having second thoughts.
Trans people have been on the wards that have been congruent to their gender all my life - if it was an issue I think we would have known before this culture war started. If trans people are put on wards according to their assignment at birth you will be outing them to other patients, making them vulnerable, and you will make them less likely to come forward for healthcare. Not only that, but you will have patients question the cisness of people who just aren't cis enough - as has increasingly been the case in toilets and changing facilities and sports; stories I have shared here and you have waved away.
We have multiple reports that link the rising violence against LGBTQ+ people to the increasingly hostile rhetoric against transgender people. Why is that? Because the "logic" of the oppression is the same - in heteronormative patriarchy a gay man is "not a real man" and a lesbian "is not a real woman" because we do not procreate or perform to gender norms of masculinity and femininity. Most queer people know this because we experience it all the goddamn time.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/conservativeparty/52678861145/
Bit odd how the students have US universities (U Kentucky & Purdue) tops on in Truro though.
Students & little Rishi from another angle
https://www.flickr.com/photos/conservativeparty/52677913187/in/photostream/
https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/05/22/europe-lgbtq-rainbow-map-index-ranking-uk-malta-rights/
And violence against queer people has increased greatly:
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a43009355/deadliest-rise-in-lgbtqia-violence/
Anecdotally, I remember at university getting the odd person looking at me funny or making comments when holding hands with a male presenting partner. That was happening less frequently. It has increased in the last few years. And, again anecdotally, my queer friends are seeing the same.
Smoking fags is usually something not very enjoyable, taken up to "fit in", but which people then can't get out of, thanks to addiction. I'm not generally a believer in banning things, but banning smoking is more sane than lots of other things we ban...
The ways of fashion are strange.
A LOL, not long ago, was a TikTok influencer proclaiming that "Metallic" t-shirts were the next Big Thing.
You are about as 'serious' as Matt Gaetz.
Also, what's up with plaque buildup on Sunak's teeth? Rich people with shit teeth are nearly as bad as rich people with shit watches.
Back in the late 90s obviously we were too young to drive, but I passed in 1998 but have less rights than @Sandpit who passed in 1996 I think. One of those - oh it's ok kids can't drive huge lorries but 26 years later those "kids" are in their early 40s...
The change was as a result of an EU directive aimed at commercial drivers, but has caught up a lot of people who want to rent a van to move house, or carry various sporting equipment on a trailer.
There were rumours last year, that there might be a change to allow all drivers to drive 7.5t https://trans.info/trucks-ton-299324
Twats like Gaetz are cynical bullshitters, and wholly destructive of the political process.
As I've said before I remain a rejoiner but whilst we're out (And we are out) we should change things like this.
There are things that are important for them to investigate and there are things that are not. A comment by a no mark politician to an empty hall is not one of them.
If your claims had any basis in fact at all then we would be seeing perpetual traffic jams on the motorways and A roads. Of course most of the traffic jams on the main roads are caused by roadworks and improvement schemes.
In some ways, it's the most important by-election of this Parliament, or at least it is in terms of betting on the outcome of the next General Election.
I'm going to say Labour by 4k, although I don't have any real insight into it.