Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
For not being nutty enough or maybe more charitably for not being able to deliver her fantasy politics.
Aren't these two things the same?
Her fantasy politics are of course nutty enough, but from her ramblings I think she would be frustrated with someone with similar beliefs who failed to deliver (i.e. Braverman).
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Indeed. Cummings seems to perceive himself as some of rave-era anarchist, which may relate to his period in his 'twenties working as a doorman in Durham.
Unfairly blocked seems exactly the issue with Murdoch. He instantly hated not the old aristo elite, but Britain's postwar cultural elite, the Melvyn Braggs and Joan Bakewells. It was hugely important to him that British TV and media was no longer what he thought was intellectually elitist and snobby, and he hated this influence. The problem was that these people were helping to make this country a far more thoughtful, interesting and nuanced place.
It's hard to think of a single person who's done more to harm this country in my lifetime than Murdoch.
Terrible look in opening of the cricket...135k capacity stadium with what looks like not even as many as Tory party conference attendees.
Well quite. Where the hell is everyone?
The promotors are going to lose their shirts if only matches involving India sell any tickets. But even so, it’s not hard to find thousands of schoolkids and students who will turn up and watch a cricket match for free for for $1, at least get an atmosphere going in the stadium.
Is England v Australia, on 4th Nov in the same stadium, also going to be empty?
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
Yea, that technology is very cool. It has the downside of needing dedicated tracks though, so in a UK context you’d need to build London to at least Manchester in one go.
There was a UK proposal for a Maglev a couple of decades back which, if it had been given the green light at the time, could have been operational by now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Ultraspeed
We're almost at the need for dedicated tracks point here.
The original plan for thw West Coast Mainline was that the existing fast lines would become a dedicated 140mph railway with all other traffic on the slow lines (each having one track in each direction). Then Railtrack spent all their money on shops and not maintenance, went pop and the scheme got pared back.
Now? HS2 trains will be slower than the Pendolino trains they are replacing. Dumping them back onto the WCML at Handsacre just as the line gets really twisty will slow things down and actively *reduce* capacity.
Which is why they need to build the rest of 2a to connect phase 1 to phase 2b. The "potteries gap" between the sections of high speed line will be a real bottleneck.
So running Pendos on HS2 would be quicker for services going beyond Brum. Well there's the solution. Scrap the idea of new super-fast trains and just keep the Pendos. Minimal saving in journey time to Brum, but it doesn't take that long anyway. And the extra capacity on the southern WCML will still be there.
Surely the better* solution would be to do cross-platform change of train at Birmingham Interchange. That way we get the benefits of high speed running south of there and don't hold up anything on the WCML.
Or, in reality, the DfT are forcing the removal of tilting and the slowing down of services. Avanti have bought a fleet of non-tilting and slower EMUs because that is what their DfT masters directed them to do. They run slower than the trains they replace but so what.
Soon we will have "we can't afford the cost of maintaining the tilting system" and it will be turned off as CrossCountry did on the Oxford route. So it won't matter that the HS fleet won't tilt. Because by then nothing will and 125mph running will be a distant memory.
Well at least I'll be able to use my time productively on the WCML. With tilt, if I'm not looking out of the window I start to feel like I'm going to be sick.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
Yea, that technology is very cool. It has the downside of needing dedicated tracks though, so in a UK context you’d need to build London to at least Manchester in one go.
There was a UK proposal for a Maglev a couple of decades back which, if it had been given the green light at the time, could have been operational by now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Ultraspeed
We're almost at the need for dedicated tracks point here.
The original plan for thw West Coast Mainline was that the existing fast lines would become a dedicated 140mph railway with all other traffic on the slow lines (each having one track in each direction). Then Railtrack spent all their money on shops and not maintenance, went pop and the scheme got pared back.
Now? HS2 trains will be slower than the Pendolino trains they are replacing. Dumping them back onto the WCML at Handsacre just as the line gets really twisty will slow things down and actively *reduce* capacity.
Which is why they need to build the rest of 2a to connect phase 1 to phase 2b. The "potteries gap" between the sections of high speed line will be a real bottleneck.
So running Pendos on HS2 would be quicker for services going beyond Brum. Well there's the solution. Scrap the idea of new super-fast trains and just keep the Pendos. Minimal saving in journey time to Brum, but it doesn't take that long anyway. And the extra capacity on the southern WCML will still be there.
Surely the better* solution would be to do cross-platform change of train at Birmingham Interchange. That way we get the benefits of high speed running south of there and don't hold up anything on the WCML.
Or, in reality, the DfT are forcing the removal of tilting and the slowing down of services. Avanti have bought a fleet of non-tilting and slower EMUs because that is what their DfT masters directed them to do. They run slower than the trains they replace but so what.
Soon we will have "we can't afford the cost of maintaining the tilting system" and it will be turned off as CrossCountry did on the Oxford route. So it won't matter that the HS fleet won't tilt. Because by then nothing will and 125mph running will be a distant memory.
Exzcept on the East Coast, which was supposed to be come a local line only ...
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Indeed. Cummings seems to perceive himself as some of rave-era anarchist, which may relate to his period in his 'twenties working as a doorman in Durham.
Unfairly blocked seems exactly the issue with Murdoch. He instantly hated not the old aristo elite, but Britain's postwar cultural elite, the Melvyn Braggs and Joan Bakewells. It was hugely important to him that British TV and media was no longer what he thought was intellectually elitist and snobby, and he hated this influence. The problem was that these people were helping to make this country a far more thoughtful, interesting and nuanced place.
It's hard to think of a single person who's done more to harm this country in my lifetime than Murdoch.
Farage ? No, actually I think you're right.
Murdoch has completely debased debate, as well as shared public culture, to such an extent as without that, I doubt we've had any Farage.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
“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.
It's a little disappointing this wasn't a photoshop SNAFU. Just one of those odd examples of people in one country wearing symbols from another country even though they are meaningless to them. A global phenomenon: witness the union jacks on apparel around the world, the ubiquitous stars and stripes, the NY baseball caps, premier league or liga football shirts (maybe not so meaningless to the wearer).
Back in the 70s I had a "Texas Tigers" T-shirt. I don't even know if they are a real team.
I was in Berlin recently wearing some random t-shirt i picked up somewhere with the name of an American college’s football team on it. An American student happened to walk by me, saw it, big broad grin on his face and was like ‘hey man, go (whatever team it was, without looking at the shirt I can’t even remember what the name)!’
Seeing my look of utter incomprehension his face fell and he went ‘that’s just a random shirt to you, isn’t it?’ Yep, sorry mate.
So why did you buy the shirt?
Places like Primark and the other fast fashion retailers are full of random stuff like this. I've got t-shirts that advertise festivals in 80s Japan, and 70s Germany, plus various sports teams from all over the world. Some will probably be real, others might even be made up.
There will be many 1000s of them produced because it costs almost nothing to license the image, and they're just looking for something different to last season.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
Has a horse called "Barack Obama" because it is "half black and half white"... Yeah, great people.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
“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.
It's a little disappointing this wasn't a photoshop SNAFU. Just one of those odd examples of people in one country wearing symbols from another country even though they are meaningless to them. A global phenomenon: witness the union jacks on apparel around the world, the ubiquitous stars and stripes, the NY baseball caps, premier league or liga football shirts (maybe not so meaningless to the wearer).
Back in the 70s I had a "Texas Tigers" T-shirt. I don't even know if they are a real team.
I was in Berlin recently wearing some random t-shirt i picked up somewhere with the name of an American college’s football team on it. An American student happened to walk by me, saw it, big broad grin on his face and was like ‘hey man, go (whatever team it was, without looking at the shirt I can’t even remember what the name)!’
Seeing my look of utter incomprehension his face fell and he went ‘that’s just a random shirt to you, isn’t it?’ Yep, sorry mate.
So why did you buy the shirt?
Places like Primark and the other fast fashion retailers are full of random stuff like this. I've got t-shirts that advertise festivals in 80s Japan, and 70s Germany, plus various sports teams from all over the world. Some will probably be real, others might even be made up.
There will be many 1000s of them produced because it costs almost nothing to license the image, and they're just looking for something different to last season.
Fanatics have become a giant company on the back of this idea. They buy the licences to stick the brands of particularly US sports teams on everything and then they pump out massive piles of crap with the logo splashed on. It ranges from the standard replica shirts, but they make huge amount of money out of rando t-shirt with logo on which they sell throughout the market.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
“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.
It's a little disappointing this wasn't a photoshop SNAFU. Just one of those odd examples of people in one country wearing symbols from another country even though they are meaningless to them. A global phenomenon: witness the union jacks on apparel around the world, the ubiquitous stars and stripes, the NY baseball caps, premier league or liga football shirts (maybe not so meaningless to the wearer).
Back in the 70s I had a "Texas Tigers" T-shirt. I don't even know if they are a real team.
I was in Berlin recently wearing some random t-shirt i picked up somewhere with the name of an American college’s football team on it. An American student happened to walk by me, saw it, big broad grin on his face and was like ‘hey man, go (whatever team it was, without looking at the shirt I can’t even remember what the name)!’
Seeing my look of utter incomprehension his face fell and he went ‘that’s just a random shirt to you, isn’t it?’ Yep, sorry mate.
So why did you buy the shirt?
Places like Primark and the other fast fashion retailers are full of random stuff like this. I've got t-shirts that advertise festivals in 80s Japan, and 70s Germany, plus various sports teams from all over the world. Some will probably be real, others might even be made up.
There will be many 1000s of them produced because it costs almost nothing to license the image, and they're just looking for something different to last season.
Well someone has made a load of dosh by pretending to be a brand of Japanese motor oil, so why not?
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.
I'm not even bitter that you got six likes for this one-liner when I got none for my post. Honestly.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
I've noticed this tendency increasingly starting creeping into Channel 4 News and some of its US congressional coverage, over the last couple of years, too.
With the Telegraph and Talk TV and GB News bringing up the other side, something is not going well.
So the most pertinent question that I managed to bury deep in my long post earlier is this:
What is the problem that road building is meant to solve?
That is, what activity could take place tomorrow with a new road that does not take place today because that road isn't there? I guess this is mostly around opportunity costs from spending longer in traffic or from being put off making that journey because you want to avoid traffic. So where in the country are the pain points, and how sure can we be that a new road will fix that?
Even if we can demonstrate past progress (and my challenge on that front remains open), there's also surely the question of diminishing returns. Would widening the M8 to ten lanes speed up travel very much? If so, would 20 lanes be even better? Would a direct road from Fort William to Ullapool unlock Ullapool's potential? By how much?
And crucially, thinking outside the confines of the economy, would we also lose something along the way?
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
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
Of course it is.
People only make journeys that are economically productive for them, and others they trade with.
That's what I tell my mum, but she keeps inviting me over.
And if you and your mum get satisfaction from your visit then that is productive for you.
If you are not visiting your mum due to a lack of infrastructure making it inconvenient, then that is problematic, is it not?
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
Yet we wonder why a group of Congresscritters wants to take a good look at the federal budget, and not just sign a massive omnibus continuation bill?
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
Hasn't it been that way for a long time?
Much more so recently, I would say. It's a trend across the media.
The main values are of clicks, immediate provocation and/or entertainment and impact, because those are the values of social media.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
Yet we wonder why a group of Congresscritters wants to take a good look at the federal budget, and not just sign a massive omnibus continuation bill?
Nobody wonders why. They are hoping to damage the US economy through a federal government shutdown and improve DJT's chances in 2024.
Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has slammed the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU, lambasting the country as massively “corrupt.”
Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has slammed the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU, lambasting the country as massively “corrupt.”
He's probably right. Ukraine is not nearly ready for EU accession.
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.
But 50 years ago, it was one of the most intolerant and used to criminalise people gay people. It is only tolerant now because of the hard work and effort and pressure for change.
It is perfectly possible to reverse the current situation and start targeting people again and that reversal has to start somewhere. Sunak is the leader of the country. He can give a lead in whatever direction he chooses and steer policy to suit.
That is why that speech is so troubling
Indeed. We’ve seen in the US how quickly concern over trans rights has been misused by many on the US right to move to, e.g., banning any books with gay characters in them (or even a children’s book in which two male characters are sharing a flat), banning the equivalent of pantomime, and attempts to reverse gay marriage. What we see at the Tory conference is not a desire for considered discussion of issues, but dog whistling to extreme views; see also references to conspiracy theories around 15-minute neighbourhoods.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
Yet we wonder why a group of Congresscritters wants to take a good look at the federal budget, and not just sign a massive omnibus continuation bill?
Nobody wonders why. They are hoping to damage the US economy through a federal government shutdown and improve DJT's chances in 2024.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
Yet we wonder why a group of Congresscritters wants to take a good look at the federal budget, and not just sign a massive omnibus continuation bill?
They aren’t interested in fixing the problem.
The same guys and girls voted down using SAA agreements on Commercial Crew. Instead of FAR.
Despite the following facts
1) SAA had been proven to work with Commercial Cargo. And reduced costs 2) NASA and everyone involved said FAR would raise costs and delay the program.
Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has slammed the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU, lambasting the country as massively “corrupt.”
Wait till you hear what a former (and possibly future) POTUS & his pals say about Ukraine.
Of course Sunak has the COVID enquiry to face and to explain the number of deaths he apparently caused by that reckless "Eat Out" policy in August 2020.
I hope the enquiry will look at the increase in social communication disorders in children caused by the cruel restrictions, which will affect them for life and is much more serious in our case.
The Inauiry is indeed looking at these sorts of issues.
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
Of course it is.
People only make journeys that are economically productive for them, and others they trade with.
An argument that requires assertion isn’t much of an argument
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
IIRC Mary Wakefield’s Dad bought his own castle. So hardly aristocracy.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
I've seen that in the private sector in London. We were putting a cooling tower on a tower block. Firm we were contracted to had a manager on site and some agency staff to install some of the kit themselves. I forget exactly how it came to light, but it turned out the on-site manager and his mate in the agency were cheerful hiring non-existent agency staff to the project, and splitting the proceeds between them...
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.
But 50 years ago, it was one of the most intolerant and used to criminalise people gay people. It is only tolerant now because of the hard work and effort and pressure for change.
It is perfectly possible to reverse the current situation and start targeting people again and that reversal has to start somewhere. Sunak is the leader of the country. He can give a lead in whatever direction he chooses and steer policy to suit.
That is why that speech is so troubling
Indeed. We’ve seen in the US how quickly concern over trans rights has been misused by many on the US right to move to, e.g., banning any books with gay characters in them (or even a children’s book in which two male characters are sharing a flat), banning the equivalent of pantomime, and attempts to reverse gay marriage. What we see at the Tory conference is not a desire for considered discussion of issues, but dog whistling to extreme views; see also references to conspiracy theories around 15-minute neighbourhoods.
It doesn’t actually take that much for minorities to feel unwelcome or unsafe. Careless and provocative rhetoric from British politicians went into overdrive in 2016 and hasn’t abated.
Having said that, I wouldn’t really look to “the US” as much of an example. The South has been a hotbed of bizarre and illiberal lawmaking since…forever.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
Even though CON are in complete meltdown it will be really really difficult for LAB to get more than 350 given they start at around 200.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolutely drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
It's like the right wing of the country has had a long hard look at Corbynite wing of Labour and said to itself "well we didn't like the policies, but by golly that is the way to go about things."
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
And that’s a major source of cost overruns—plans getting changed all the time.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
Even though CON are in complete meltdown it will be really really difficult for LAB to get more than 350 given they start at around 200.
Indeed! But after Election 24 there will be a LOT of retained Con seats that are left on a knife edge of going red (or yellow) at the following election.
Con had better choose their next leader wisely or they could face an absolute cataclysm in any subsequent election.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
His father in law isn’t some kind of creepy eugenicist. He said that people are the product of their genes and that if two people who have been successful marry each other then their children are more likely to be successful.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
Faisal Islam @faisalislam Japan building revolutionary 177 mile maglev from Tokyo to Nagoya for £45bn, 90% in tunnels under mountains as part of integrated Shinkansen system…
equivalent of London to Manchester (in straight line) in 40 minutes… at 310mph
The ridiculous cost of large public sector projects needs to be looked at because - nuclear power is another traincrash for finances in this country generally.
The management of the Euston end of the HS2 project has been terrible. I know electricians working on the project at Euston who for the past year have done no work but are getting paid £2200 per week. They just go and sit in the site hut and play on their phones. I imagine this type of management is why Sunak said yesterday that those in charge of the Euston bit are being relieved of their duties. It does seem a British thing that for large scale public projects people are much more interested in how much money they can make from it for very little work rather than getting the job done on time..
They are on time - they're being paid £2,200 a week because the section east of OOC was put on hold back in the spring.
£2,200 per week to do no work is an OK way for public money to be spent?
Hell no! But this is Tory spivism in action - pay large amounts of money for nothing. Remember all the duff PPE contracts? How is this any different?
TBF some of that money is coming back to the Treasury in tax. But not sure how much. Not keeping up with [edit] what is and what is not allowed for the self-employed these days - didn't it change recently?
Lots of expenses in London
There was an article in the NYT about similar stuff in New York public projects. As usual, the Americans had taken it to its logical conclusion and were paying fictional workers to do nothing.
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
I've seen that in the private sector in London. We were putting a cooling tower on a tower block. Firm we were contracted to had a manager on site and some agency staff to install some of the kit themselves. I forget exactly how it came to light, but it turned out the on-site manager and his mate in the agency were cheerful hiring non-existent agency staff to the project, and splitting the proceeds between them...
They probably had been watching the Only Fools and Horses episode where Del Boy and Mike collude to similar effect. Or it was ever thus.
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.
I'm not even bitter that you got six likes for this one-liner when I got none for my post. Honestly.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
IIRC Mary Wakefield’s Dad bought his own castle. So hardly aristocracy.
Blimey, a castle/big house/ruin in Northumberland I haven't yet visited ! Will have to go next year perhaps.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
His father in law isn’t some kind of creepy eugenicist. He said that people are the product of their genes and that if two people who have been successful marry each other then their children are more likely to be successful.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
"That’s not eugenics... part of what government action should be about"
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
Even though CON are in complete meltdown it will be really really difficult for LAB to get more than 350 given they start at around 200.
Indeed! But after Election 24 there will be a LOT of retained Con seats that are left on a knife edge of going red (or yellow) at the following election.
Con had better choose their next leader wisely or they could face an absolute cataclysm in any subsequent election.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
IIRC Mary Wakefield’s Dad bought his own castle. So hardly aristocracy.
He bought the castle, but he inherited his baronetcy. He’s an aristo. Her mum was also the daughter of a baron.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
His father in law isn’t some kind of creepy eugenicist. He said that people are the product of their genes and that if two people who have been successful marry each other then their children are more likely to be successful.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
The second Baronet - which sounds aristocratic to me, despite your earlier denial - suggests that he’d very much prefer his children not marry a talented person of low socio-economic status because he wants to see a long pedigree of success from ancestors.
I guess that rules me out, as my father left school at 14 and is borderline illiterate.
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.
I'm not even bitter that you got six likes for this one-liner when I got none for my post. Honestly.
Because he’s more productive than you…
That's hard to understand. Where I live there's only roads. No train lines in the whole constituency. No bike lanes. I should be the most productive person here.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
His father in law isn’t some kind of creepy eugenicist. He said that people are the product of their genes and that if two people who have been successful marry each other then their children are more likely to be successful.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
Here’s a quote: “In general, to be elitist, I think the quality climbs up the tree of life. In general, high things in the tree of life have quality, have skills, and they get wonderful degrees at university. And they marry each other and that gets them better again. Intelligence and talent is lovely. But I want parents and grandparents who've had hands on success, running their battles well, and proving they're wonderful. Because one is the subject of one's genes, and I like the idea of them being successful genes, and winning through to successful puppies.”
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Always best to be mistrustful of people who rail against elites, it usually signals that they're hoping to replace the old elite themselves, or are already part of the elite but feel their power is being unfairly blocked. Hence the ludicrous spectacle of Dominic Cummings (private school, Oxford, married into the aristocracy, runs campaigns financed by private equity dark money, worked for the PM) attacking 'the elite' - by which he means junior civil servants who dare to question him throwing public money at his bizarre pet causes, or probably just anyone with a university degree who disagrees with him.
Also worth mentioning that Cummings’s father-in-law is some kind of creepy eugenicist, and that Cummings himself is an enthusiastic follower of various libertarian crypto-influencers.
None of this is normal.
His father in law isn’t some kind of creepy eugenicist. He said that people are the product of their genes and that if two people who have been successful marry each other then their children are more likely to be successful.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
Here’s a quote: “In general, to be elitist, I think the quality climbs up the tree of life. In general, high things in the tree of life have quality, have skills, and they get wonderful degrees at university. And they marry each other and that gets them better again. Intelligence and talent is lovely. But I want parents and grandparents who've had hands on success, running their battles well, and proving they're wonderful. Because one is the subject of one's genes, and I like the idea of them being successful genes, and winning through to successful puppies.”
That's reading as pretty much hereditarian to me. Not an awful lot of environment or upbringing there.
As a liberal, I'm hoping that Starmer, surely our next PM, will give a conference speech setting out clear water between him and Sunak. Talking about the future with confidence, of a Britain with a place for all, a place with ambition, not some backward looking backwater too scared of its own shadow to progress.
But, I supect, he'll avoid saying anything that might send more reactionary voters back to the party for the 1950s and leave us liberals voting Labour (in seats where they're the best challengers) out of weary duty to see the back of the Tories rather than any enthusiasm. It may be politically smart, but then maybe it would be worth the risk to actually drum up some enthusiasm (and, maybe, a bigger majority) with a positive message rather than relying on simply being not the Tories.
So the most pertinent question that I managed to bury deep in my long post earlier is this:
What is the problem that road building is meant to solve?
That is, what activity could take place tomorrow with a new road that does not take place today because that road isn't there? I guess this is mostly around opportunity costs from spending longer in traffic or from being put off making that journey because you want to avoid traffic. So where in the country are the pain points, and how sure can we be that a new road will fix that?
Even if we can demonstrate past progress (and my challenge on that front remains open), there's also surely the question of diminishing returns. Would widening the M8 to ten lanes speed up travel very much? If so, would 20 lanes be even better? Would a direct road from Fort William to Ullapool unlock Ullapool's potential? By how much?
And crucially, thinking outside the confines of the economy, would we also lose something along the way?
Widening lanes is I think the completely wrong priority. And the only thing the Treasury funds irritatingly.
Far better return is creating new lines, new routes, as either alternatives to existing ones or creating routes that aren't presently viable.
Plenty of suggestions exist.
For instance I've repeatedly suggested here an M580 (a term I coined myself) to run parallel to the A580 East Lancs Road which is one of the most populated corridors in the NW but lacks any motorways currently so people have to drive South to get to the M62 then back North again, or clog up what should be more local roads while sitting at red lights.
Other possible routes I'd suggest would be Oxford to Cambridge, or the never built M64 linking Stoke with Derby (and the M6 and M1) without going via Birmingham.
As a liberal, I'm hoping that Starmer, surely our next PM, will give a conference speech setting out clear water between him and Sunak. Talking about the future with confidence, of a Britain with a place for all, a place with ambition, not some backward looking backwater too scared of its own shadow to progress.
But, I supect, he'll avoid saying anything that might send more reactionary voters back to the party for the 1950s and leave us liberals voting Labour (in seats where they're the best challengers) out of weary duty to see the back of the Tories rather than any enthusiasm. It may be politically smart, but then maybe it would be worth the risk to actually drum up some enthusiasm (and, maybe, a bigger majority) with a positive message rather than relying on simply being not the Tories.
If form is anything to go by, he’ll say nothing of interest.
Starmer’s talent - and I actually think it’s exceptional - is in bureaucratic management. Despite Sunak’s claim to competent technocracy, Starmer actually obliterates him on this aspect.
But in terms of content, Starmer plays it safe to the point of insipidity. Although I am happy with the subterranean policy noises coming from Rachel Reeves, the few flagship policies, including VAT on private schools are essentially cringey sops to culture warriors.
So the most pertinent question that I managed to bury deep in my long post earlier is this:
What is the problem that road building is meant to solve?
That is, what activity could take place tomorrow with a new road that does not take place today because that road isn't there? I guess this is mostly around opportunity costs from spending longer in traffic or from being put off making that journey because you want to avoid traffic. So where in the country are the pain points, and how sure can we be that a new road will fix that?
Even if we can demonstrate past progress (and my challenge on that front remains open), there's also surely the question of diminishing returns. Would widening the M8 to ten lanes speed up travel very much? If so, would 20 lanes be even better? Would a direct road from Fort William to Ullapool unlock Ullapool's potential? By how much?
And crucially, thinking outside the confines of the economy, would we also lose something along the way?
Are 2-tonne steel boxes, usually with one occupant, the most energy and cost efficient way of moving people around the country?
Once they arrive in that city or town, how do we stop them getting in the way of public transport like buses and trams, or causing a hostile environment for those walking and cycling? A car is about half the size of my living room/kitchen - is a parked car the most efficient use of space?
And don't dismiss the distributional side of this. Entry costs to driving are exceptionally high*, so younger and poorer people will miss out on most of the benefits of new roads. Some disabled and older people cannot drive for health reasons, including some of my friends (epilepsy, etc).
* It would be great if the entry costs to driving were low, but the running costs high. That would mean that more people have access to those journeys that are hard to complete with active travel/public transport, but for those journeys that are possible the marginal cost is less than for driving.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
And Express readers!
I think that it has never been true that newspaper readers necessarily follow the editorial line on politics. Often they like the paper in other ways, eg the sports coverage or celebrity gossip, and ignore the Op Ed columns.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
Alison Pearson, The Tele's bonkers right-wing cheer leader announced in her column this week that she was hoping the Conservatives lose the next election.
A lot of loopy, far right conservatives are hoping the Tories lose the election so they can get a "pure" far right leadership/party in place (Sue-Ellen is their poster girl)
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
Piss off. Sunak was inflicted on the country by idiots within the Tory Party who insisted we needed 'the grown-ups in the room' to manage the economy and win elections. Now this has proven to be utter horse-shite, and he's God-awful in every way, we should apparently retain the a social democrat stance so we can continue the privilege of 'not losing even more'.
I have reservations about Suella's leadership ambitions, but did polling posted here after her speech not show a majority in favour of all her key points?
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
I've noticed this tendency increasingly starting creeping into Channel 4 News and some of its US congressional coverage, over the last couple of years, too.
With the Telegraph and Talk TV and GB News bringing up the other side, something is not going well.
BBC World Service and the Economist are the best remaining outlets. Covering a different function but relevant, the New Statesman, in its recent form, is remarkably free of absolute rubbish - while of course totally open about its broadly progressive agenda.
What no-one at all is doing is articulating a consistent Right Wing/conservative position WRT how it would deliver in policy terms now - as Worsthorne was doing in an earlier day in the STel, or the Spectator once did. They are all reduced to an unpleasant mixture of description of what is wrong (we can all do that) and attacks on others, and cheerleading for some ghastly people.
Sun readers leaning Labour, and Daily Mail readers only prefer Cons to Lab by 2%
Bloody hell, the Tories have lost Daily Telegraph readers.
As a Telegraph subscriber, I have previously mentioned the Telegraph's sudden lurch to the alt-right earlier this year. It might be this is putting off the mainstream, small-c conservatives who comprise its readership.
I think the Guardian's lurch at times recently toward one-track dogmatism must be equally off-putting to some of its older liberal readers.
Even after Thatcher destroyed so much in British public culture and broadcasting at the behest of Murdoch , and his obsessive resentment of all and any of the British postwar elites, Britain was partially redeemed by having a reasonably intelligent broadsheet press. We're partly in such trouble now because any nuances are disappearing there, too.
Guardian columnists' dogmatism is only matched by their fondness for academic jargon which too often defeats this bear of very little brain.
The Guardian has joined most others in failing to distinguish clearly between the dispassionate reporting of hard facts and the expression of editorial and other opinion.
I've noticed this tendency increasingly starting creeping into Channel 4 News and some of its US congressional coverage, over the last couple of years, too.
With the Telegraph and Talk TV and GB News bringing up the other side, something is not going well.
BBC World Service and the Economist are the best remaining outlets. Covering a different function but relevant, the New Statesman, in its recent form, is remarkably free of absolute rubbish - while of course totally open about its broadly progressive agenda.
What no-one at all is doing is articulating a consistent Right Wing/conservative position WRT how it would deliver in policy terms now - as Worsthorne was doing in an earlier day in the STel, or the Spectator once did. They are all reduced to an unpleasant mixture of description of what is wrong (we can all do that) and attacks on others, and cheerleading for some ghastly people.
Very good point. I actually used to read and enjoy both the Telegraph and the Spectator for its coherent right-wing critique during the Blair years.
So the most pertinent question that I managed to bury deep in my long post earlier is this:
What is the problem that road building is meant to solve?
That is, what activity could take place tomorrow with a new road that does not take place today because that road isn't there? I guess this is mostly around opportunity costs from spending longer in traffic or from being put off making that journey because you want to avoid traffic. So where in the country are the pain points, and how sure can we be that a new road will fix that?
Even if we can demonstrate past progress (and my challenge on that front remains open), there's also surely the question of diminishing returns. Would widening the M8 to ten lanes speed up travel very much? If so, would 20 lanes be even better? Would a direct road from Fort William to Ullapool unlock Ullapool's potential? By how much?
And crucially, thinking outside the confines of the economy, would we also lose something along the way?
Are 2-tonne steel boxes, usually with one occupant, the most energy and cost efficient way of moving people around the country?
Once they arrive in that city or town, how do we stop them getting in the way of public transport like buses and trams, or causing a hostile environment for those walking and cycling? A car is about half the size of my living room/kitchen - is a parked car the most efficient use of space?
And don't dismiss the distributional side of this. Entry costs to driving are exceptionally high*, so younger and poorer people will miss out on most of the benefits of new roads. Some disabled and older people cannot drive for health reasons, including some of my friends (epilepsy, etc).
* It would be great if the entry costs to driving were low, but the running costs high. That would mean that more people have access to those journeys that are hard to complete with active travel/public transport, but for those journeys that are possible the marginal cost is less than for driving.
I've been saying your last point for years, though seldom so pithily. *Applause*
Comments
The promotors are going to lose their shirts if only matches involving India sell any tickets. But even so, it’s not hard to find thousands of schoolkids and students who will turn up and watch a cricket match for free for for $1, at least get an atmosphere going in the stadium.
Is England v Australia, on 4th Nov in the same stadium, also going to be empty?
Murdoch has completely debased debate, as well as shared public culture, to such an extent as without that, I doubt we've had any Farage.
There will be many 1000s of them produced because it costs almost nothing to license the image, and they're just looking for something different to last season.
I'm not even bitter that you got six likes for this one-liner when I got none for my post. Honestly.
With the Telegraph and Talk TV and GB News bringing up the other side, something is not going well.
What is the problem that road building is meant to solve?
That is, what activity could take place tomorrow with a new road that does not take place today because that road isn't there?
I guess this is mostly around opportunity costs from spending longer in traffic or from being put off making that journey because you want to avoid traffic. So where in the country are the pain points, and how sure can we be that a new road will fix that?
Even if we can demonstrate past progress (and my challenge on that front remains open), there's also surely the question of diminishing returns. Would widening the M8 to ten lanes speed up travel very much? If so, would 20 lanes be even better? Would a direct road from Fort William to Ullapool unlock Ullapool's potential? By how much?
And crucially, thinking outside the confines of the economy, would we also lose something along the way?
There was even an attempt to justify this on the grounds that everyone deserved a share of the pie!
If you are not visiting your mum due to a lack of infrastructure making it inconvenient, then that is problematic, is it not?
It's a trend across the media.
The main values are of clicks, immediate provocation and/or entertainment and impact, because those are the values of social media.
As if they give a shit about anything else.
Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has slammed the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU, lambasting the country as massively “corrupt.”
The same guys and girls voted down using SAA agreements on Commercial Crew. Instead of FAR.
Despite the following facts
1) SAA had been proven to work with Commercial Cargo. And reduced costs
2) NASA and everyone involved said FAR would raise costs and delay the program.
FAR is a about pork control
A day late and a dollar short there, my prediction is for NZ to get the runs in 43 overs.
On a different scale to the rest of Europe.
Ukraine’s economic performance post 1989 to pre-invasion was absolutely terrible. Several issues, but off-the-charts corruption was one.
The party will of course be completely unelectable and will take the Conservatives off into the wilderness for a decade but will make them feel good about themselves.
Although I still think Labour will only win the next election with a small 1-20 seat majority it's not out of the question the Tories could face an absolute drubbing at the following election, if they take themselves down the rabbit hole of the loopy far right in Opposition.
https://x.com/snigskitchen/status/1709882382730269146?s=20
I forget exactly how it came to light, but it turned out the on-site manager and his mate in the agency were cheerful hiring non-existent agency staff to the project, and splitting the proceeds between them...
Having said that, I wouldn’t really look to “the US” as much of an example. The South has been a hotbed of bizarre and illiberal lawmaking since…forever.
They are insane.
"Sycamore Gap: Hadrian's Wall damage seen after tree felled"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-67015699
Con had better choose their next leader wisely or they could face an absolute cataclysm in any subsequent election.
That’s not eugenics - it’s a statement of probabilities (and part of what government action should be about fixing by ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that prevent first generation talented people from succeeding)
I guess that rules me out, as my father left school at 14 and is borderline illiterate.
New Thread
As a liberal, I'm hoping that Starmer, surely our next PM, will give a conference speech setting out clear water between him and Sunak. Talking about the future with confidence, of a Britain with a place for all, a place with ambition, not some backward looking backwater too scared of its own shadow to progress.
But, I supect, he'll avoid saying anything that might send more reactionary voters back to the party for the 1950s and leave us liberals voting Labour (in seats where they're the best challengers) out of weary duty to see the back of the Tories rather than any enthusiasm. It may be politically smart, but then maybe it would be worth the risk to actually drum up some enthusiasm (and, maybe, a bigger majority) with a positive message rather than relying on simply being not the Tories.
This thread has been bulldozed for a six-lane motorway
Far better return is creating new lines, new routes, as either alternatives to existing ones or creating routes that aren't presently viable.
Plenty of suggestions exist.
For instance I've repeatedly suggested here an M580 (a term I coined myself) to run parallel to the A580 East Lancs Road which is one of the most populated corridors in the NW but lacks any motorways currently so people have to drive South to get to the M62 then back North again, or clog up what should be more local roads while sitting at red lights.
Other possible routes I'd suggest would be Oxford to Cambridge, or the never built M64 linking Stoke with Derby (and the M6 and M1) without going via Birmingham.
Starmer’s talent - and I actually think it’s exceptional - is in bureaucratic management. Despite Sunak’s claim to competent technocracy, Starmer actually obliterates him on this aspect.
But in terms of content, Starmer plays it safe to the point of insipidity. Although I am happy with the subterranean policy noises coming from Rachel Reeves, the few flagship policies, including VAT on private schools are essentially cringey sops to culture warriors.
Once they arrive in that city or town, how do we stop them getting in the way of public transport like buses and trams, or causing a hostile environment for those walking and cycling? A car is about half the size of my living room/kitchen - is a parked car the most efficient use of space?
And don't dismiss the distributional side of this. Entry costs to driving are exceptionally high*, so younger and poorer people will miss out on most of the benefits of new roads. Some disabled and older people cannot drive for health reasons, including some of my friends (epilepsy, etc).
* It would be great if the entry costs to driving were low, but the running costs high. That would mean that more people have access to those journeys that are hard to complete with active travel/public transport, but for those journeys that are possible the marginal cost is less than for driving.
I have reservations about Suella's leadership ambitions, but did polling posted here after her speech not show a majority in favour of all her key points?
What no-one at all is doing is articulating a consistent Right Wing/conservative position WRT how it would deliver in policy terms now - as Worsthorne was doing in an earlier day in the STel, or the Spectator once did. They are all reduced to an unpleasant mixture of description of what is wrong (we can all do that) and attacks on others, and cheerleading for some ghastly people.
I actually used to read and enjoy both the Telegraph and the Spectator for its coherent right-wing critique during the Blair years.