Seizure of assets of directors of bankrupt energy firms might be a better safeguard.
Limited liability for directors often means unlimited liability for taxpayers.
We made a massive mistake as a country by not letting banks go bust in 2008. The Government should have protected deposits and put in place systems for the transfer of business to other banks but as far as the institutions themselves and their shareholders were concerned they should have been allowed to fail.
Come on Richard, everyone knows Iceland became an uninhabitable wasteland after they did the very same back in 2008.
The entire population of Iceland would struggle to put together a Sunday league football team. In Britain, a series of bank failures would have been catastrophic.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
It does seem a bit bonkers seeing as we're basically now down to the "Proper" companies and all the Zebras, Flow energies, isupplyenergies and 101 other minnows went bust a while back.
The more news comes out about the Israel - Hamas war, the greater my feeling that Israel has license to do something generational.
Some debate about what to call Hamas. They are the government of Gaza and a declaration of war has formally been made. Israel sees Hamas as terrorists and they are, but they are also a government - hence the declaration of war.
Legally that makes it people combatants, not terrorists. Israel is therefore now under the international rules of war - as are Hamas. Whilst people are warning Israel not to act illegally, the same is now true of Hamas. And whilst Hamas combatants kidnap, rape and behead, and see martyrdom as a goal, there should be little objection to Israel's actions.
Prisoners have rights in war. But not lunatics trying to kill everyone including themselves. Gaza's civilians need more consideration, but the enemy are hiding amongst and embedded within those civilians. As so many Israeli military leaders are saying, once you go in you have to assume that everyone is a combatant and every object a bomb - because in the past they have been. Self-defence is just and legal in war, even at individual level...
The laws of war don’t apply for just declared wars. All armed conflict included.
The original Hague convention was written with input from British officers who had served on the frontline in Afghanistan. It was designed to regulate non state and semi state groups from the beginning.
Hama easily meet the test for being an organised party in the conflict - Command structure etc.
I appreciate the broadening of my understanding! Either way, there are rules. Which Hamas are not remotely respecting.
The curious thing is that suggesting the Laws of War should be used against non-state actors in the modern era hits a strange wall.
I asked some activist lawyer types about prosecuting Begum as a war criminal (which she is). I was told the idea is appalling, disgusting etc. But they couldn't seem to explain why.
That’s always struck me as strange also.
If the Laws of Armed Conflict apply to States and those who serve them, then they should also to those non-State organisations that fight them.
The very fact that they are not in uniform ought, of itself, to be treated as a war crime.
That would make every resistance group in every occupied country in the world guilty of war crimes.
And which is why the Laws of War, quite specifically, don't do that.
It seems to me that a lot of resistance movements, on the face of it, are caught by Article 4.1.2 which imposes (inter alia) requirements to bear some distinguishing badge (albeit not a uniform) and to conduct themselves in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Many do neither.
Which comes back to your point that it surprising that there should be this reluctance to prosecute them for war crimes.
Seizure of assets of directors of bankrupt energy firms might be a better safeguard.
Limited liability for directors often means unlimited liability for taxpayers.
We made a massive mistake as a country by not letting banks go bust in 2008. The Government should have protected deposits and put in place systems for the transfer of business to other banks but as far as the institutions themselves and their shareholders were concerned they should have been allowed to fail.
Come on Richard, everyone knows Iceland became an uninhabitable wasteland after they did the very same back in 2008.
The entire population of Iceland would struggle to put together a Sunday league football team. In Britain, a series of bank failures would have been catastrophic.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
Terror is still terror regardless of who does it. And Gaza especially has been terrorised. But there is a rather basic problem - it elected terrorists as its government! I always say that you get what you vote for, and Gaza chose Hamas.
That's what that nice Mr Putin says about Ukrainians electing the fascist, terrorist Zelensky government.
Yes, Putin and his cronies say that. But when, before the current conflict started, did Ukraine attack Russian territory in the manner Hamas just did?
What we see from Russia is typical deflection: accusing the enemy of performing the atrocities you have just committed. Hamas will do exactly the same. "See! They're just as bad as us!"
Thankfully, the bad guys in the Ukraine<->Russia conflict are much easier to discern than those in Palestine<->Israel. For everyone except (un)committed idiots.
On topic, the apparent Tory recovery in the chart does I think hide a bit of Dutch salute. If we look at LLG vs RefCon numbers, in the latest poll (which I expect is a bit of a short term Tory bounce) it's 60% vs 40%. At the bottom of the Tory nadir last winter, post Truss, it was 64% plays 35% and during the more recent 2023 Tory nadir around summertime it was also 64% vs 35%. But in that time Lib Dem has gone from 20-21% to routinely around 25%. Efficiency might be increasing while absolute gap is decreasing.
It seems that the 'cost of living extremely well index', ie the inflation of very expensive luxury goods, has risen twice as fast as general consumer prices during the last 40 years:
So if the extremely rich suffer higher than average inflation and the poor, as we're continually told, suffer higher than average inflation then there must be plenty of people in the middle ranks who have been enjoying lower than average inflation.
Comprehension fail: that's not what this article is saying.
Luxury goods have gone up by more than average inflation; the poor have suffered from higher than average inflation. Both statements are perfectly compatible.
They are but inflation is an 'average'.
If some groups are suffering higher inflation than the official number then other groups must be experiencing lower inflation.
So if both the poor and the super rich have higher than average inflation then much of those in between must have been benefiting from lower than average inflation.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
The problem with Gaza is this. If the blockade of the port were lifted, and Gazans were free to live and work in other countries, including Israel and Egpyt, those other countries would face terrorism at the hands of some of Gaza's people.
One could argue that's a price worth paying, to make life better for Gaza's people, but I doubt if it's something that any government could sell to its own voters.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
2,000,000 refugees on Israels border! It won't be war crimes they'll have to worry about.
‘Eliminate them’: Republicans step up calls for action against Hamas
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/gop-rhetoric-hamas-00121051 Republicans are escalating their rhetoric to call for actions to “eliminate,” “eradicate” and “level” the Hamas militant group — no matter what it takes — as Washington plots more assistance to Israel in the wake of recent attacks.
“This is sick, and we have to treat sick people the way they deserve to be treated and eliminate them,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
“Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Tuesday night.
“Hamas must be eradicated & Israel must respond DISPROPORTIONATELY to this & to any futures attacks from any enemy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday...
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
We allow companies that set up by crowdfunding £0.5m of capital in 2017 to take on 350,000 domestic energy contracts by 2021 at which point it goes bust with the owners taking £50m out of the business, and leaving £283m of increased costs to customers of British Gas.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
Another day of massive Russian casualties in Ukraine.
990 have been supported have been supported by personnel losses, 42 tanks, 44 armoured personnel vehicles, 32 artillery.
If those are the Ukrainian government figures, they don't mean very much. Though they are less fantastic than Russia's.
And there has certainly been some fierce fighting over the last few days.
The Ukrainian numbers might be considerable overcounting - but there really isn't that much evidence of it. At least two-thirds of their numbers have been supported by independent verification (although Oryx's roll in that is at an end). There is also anecdotal stuff that Ukrainians have a mass of footage that hasn't been put in the public domain, for whatever reason. But knock off even a third and these still represent massive damage to the Russian reserves of manpower and vehicles, especially as this is the second day of it.
I think the reason for the increased casualties of the last few days is the Russians turning from defence to offensive in Avdiivka.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Bodycount is not a reliable metric. It is difficult to assess even if conducted carefully. But it usually isn't and it's also liable to overcounting. We keep doing this again and again and it never works. It's even bloody difficult to do a bodycount of your own side. People do not have little implanted life markers that show up as red dots on a screen that fade out when they die.
The so called party of law and order . What a joke the Tories have become , more pathetic excuses as to why sentencing is being delayed . It’s always someone else’s fault .
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
So the real problem is excessive density. Which would be much less of a problem if the population wasn't growing, which it is mainly because we're still importing half a million people a year.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but virtually none of the UKs problems can be solved unless we get immigration down to trivial numbers*. It's immigration which drives the pressure on everything else, which then leads to pressure for more immigrants to do stuff, which leads to more pressure on everything else. It's a massive ponzi scheme, and the sooner we end it and take the resultant hit, the sooner we can get the UK on a stable long-term footing.
*all this fuss about asylum seekers/boat crossers etc is displacement activity. When we let in 10 people with visas for every one who comes on a small boat, the way to solve the problem starts with restrictions on visas, rather than implausible performance art about being nasty to the people who come by boat.
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
We have regulatory capture. The regulator is not there to protect the consumer but to protect the companies.
It seems that the 'cost of living extremely well index', ie the inflation of very expensive luxury goods, has risen twice as fast as general consumer prices during the last 40 years:
So if the extremely rich suffer higher than average inflation and the poor, as we're continually told, suffer higher than average inflation then there must be plenty of people in the middle ranks who have been enjoying lower than average inflation.
Aren't the middle ranks the most likely to cut back on non essentials ?
The rich just see a bit less, and probably don't really truly notice their accounts accumulating or diminishing a bit less each month. The poor can't cut back on anything to begin with so the greatest variability in propensity for non essentials is probably the middle.
Disruption brings change, often beneficial change.
So higher energy prices results in greater energy efficiency or higher food prices leads you discover a cheaper brand for the same quality.
The rich might have a surplus of money that they are not prompted into such changes while the poor might not have scope for any further efficiencies.
So the changes often happen in the middle ranks with some furious, others delighted and others all emotions in between,
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
The problem with Gaza is this. If the blockade of the port were lifted, and Gazans were free to live and work in other countries, including Israel and Egpyt, those other countries would face terrorism at the hands of some of Gaza's people.
One could argue that's a price worth paying, to make life better for Gaza's people, but I doubt if it's something that any government could sell to its own voters.
You could say the same of literally any nationality - "some" English people will commit terrorism when overseas (and historically you could argue that the imperial projects were just that, but state sanctioned). Varoufakis made this point a few days ago in speaking to UnHerd - Europeans weren't against free movement of peoples when it was Europeans sending millions of their people all across the globe (typically with rifles and later the Maxim gun); Elgin and Byron didn't need passports to get to Greece. But borders and passports became a necessity only in the face of migration from East to West, with Chinese workers to the US and with Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms and the rise of Nazism.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The peace imposed on Germany after WW2 was far harsher than Versailles.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
I don't know how you can say that Germany got off lightly after Versailles; although I would say I think many relatively high up Nazis and collaborators with the Nazis were let off far to lightly after WW2 - even if the German state was dissolved and the country split in two and the German people did not get a great deal.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Some of us actually like to be able to access stuff on foot, you know. Not like ****ing LA without the sun.
And some of us actually don't.
Some of us actually want our home to be a quiet residential area with a street our children can play football or ride their bikes on, and a private back or front garden our kids can play on.
So allow both. If people choose to go live in a compact city, I'm entirely fine with that. And if people choose to live in suburbia, I'm entirely fine with that too.
We don't need one size fits all. Let people choose.
PS people's demands can change too, and they can move as appropriate. As a student I loved living in a city, and going clubbing at night. My clubbing data are long behind me, I have no interest in that anymore. Now my family is what matters.
But - and I'm trying to tread carefully here, because you're being super-reasonable; I'm not saying you're wrong, just that my preferences are different - I'm probably at a similar life stage to you, and I value that my kids have access to all the opportunities an urban area affords them and that they can reach them without me having to ferry them there in a car - because we live in an area which is sufficiently high density to be able to support a good quality public transport offer. I would sacrifice a large garden for a good park close by. I would sacrifice 'quiet' for good quality public transport. If it were just me, I'd live in Windermere. I'd sacrifice accessibility to a city centre for accessibility to a national park, while still living in a functional town - albeit one offering far more than a town of that size normally would because of the tourism factor. And because the Lake District makes my heart sing with happiness. But I'm not sure it's the best place to bring up kids.
Actually, what I most want - even more than accessibility - is to live somewhere which makes my heart sing with happiness. Some urban areas have that (Didsbury), some small towns do (Windermere), some villages do (Newton in Bowland); some do not (Cheetham Hill, Skelmersdale, No Man's Heath). But that leads on to arguments about architecture and urban design and so on.
Didsbury makes your heart “sing with happiness”?
😶
It sounds unlikely. But I’ve never been. Seems I should amend that
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
2,000,000 refugees on Israels border! It won't be war crimes they'll have to worry about.
They're already on Israel's border - that's what enabled the attacks.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The peace imposed on Germany after WW2 was far harsher than Versailles.
Yet it is Versailles which is deemed too harsh.
Not really no. We rebuilt Germany after WW2 - for purely selfish reasons - and also forgave them most of their debt at the 1950 London conference. Whilst we completely restructured their state we did so whilst making sure we improved the lives of their citizenry and gave them the chance to see what it was like to enjoy the benefits and responsibilities fo a free and democratic state.
Fifteen years after the end of WW2 West Germany - or at least its peoples - was in a far better place than it had been 15 years after WW1.
The more news comes out about the Israel - Hamas war, the greater my feeling that Israel has license to do something generational.
Some debate about what to call Hamas. They are the government of Gaza and a declaration of war has formally been made. Israel sees Hamas as terrorists and they are, but they are also a government - hence the declaration of war.
Legally that makes it people combatants, not terrorists. Israel is therefore now under the international rules of war - as are Hamas. Whilst people are warning Israel not to act illegally, the same is now true of Hamas. And whilst Hamas combatants kidnap, rape and behead, and see martyrdom as a goal, there should be little objection to Israel's actions.
Prisoners have rights in war. But not lunatics trying to kill everyone including themselves. Gaza's civilians need more consideration, but the enemy are hiding amongst and embedded within those civilians. As so many Israeli military leaders are saying, once you go in you have to assume that everyone is a combatant and every object a bomb - because in the past they have been. Self-defence is just and legal in war, even at individual level...
The laws of war don’t apply for just declared wars. All armed conflict included.
The original Hague convention was written with input from British officers who had served on the frontline in Afghanistan. It was designed to regulate non state and semi state groups from the beginning.
Hama easily meet the test for being an organised party in the conflict - Command structure etc.
I appreciate the broadening of my understanding! Either way, there are rules. Which Hamas are not remotely respecting.
The curious thing is that suggesting the Laws of War should be used against non-state actors in the modern era hits a strange wall.
I asked some activist lawyer types about prosecuting Begum as a war criminal (which she is). I was told the idea is appalling, disgusting etc. But they couldn't seem to explain why.
That’s always struck me as strange also.
If the Laws of Armed Conflict apply to States and those who serve them, then they should also to those non-State organisations that fight them.
The very fact that they are not in uniform ought, of itself, to be treated as a war crime.
That would make every resistance group in every occupied country in the world guilty of war crimes.
And which is why the Laws of War, quite specifically, don't do that.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
The Germans persuaded themselves that they were undefeated, and the nationalists sought scapegoats.
Germany lost territories in places where the population had no desire at all to be part of Germany. The Germans thought that was all very unfair, but we have no reason to agree with them. The reparations imposed upon Germany were lower (in terms of share of national income) than those they imposed upon France in 1871. And, they were constantly reduced.
Danzig and Memel were the only real legitimate grievances that the Germans had.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
The problem with Gaza is this. If the blockade of the port were lifted, and Gazans were free to live and work in other countries, including Israel and Egpyt, those other countries would face terrorism at the hands of some of Gaza's people.
One could argue that's a price worth paying, to make life better for Gaza's people, but I doubt if it's something that any government could sell to its own voters.
You could say the same of literally any nationality - "some" English people will commit terrorism when overseas (and historically you could argue that the imperial projects were just that, but state sanctioned). Varoufakis made this point a few days ago in speaking to UnHerd - Europeans weren't against free movement of peoples when it was Europeans sending millions of their people all across the globe (typically with rifles and later the Maxim gun); Elgin and Byron didn't need passports to get to Greece. But borders and passports became a necessity only in the face of migration from East to West, with Chinese workers to the US and with Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms and the rise of Nazism.
We are where we are. Try being a government in a democracy, arguing to their voters that they must accept punishment for their ancestors' actions.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
No anger from me, just genuine disagreement.
Yes it might be a mistake, or it might be the right thing to do and resolve the situation.
More than half a century has passed of Palestinians living in land Israel won in its defensive war in 1967 without relocation or a peace settlement, and has it exactly worked out well? I think the one thing we can all agree it has not.
Ideally a peace settlement should have been reached. I think we can all agree with that. But its not on the cards. The Palestinians have rejected it time and again, and to be frank why the hell should Israel want to reach an accord when they're now led by people like Hamas who openly want to [and would] kill every Israeli from sea to sea now?
If there were an enemy threatening to murder every Englishman on the British Isles then I'd want them defeated, not reach an agreement with them.
The best thing to do might be to find the Palestinians a home of their own outside of Greater Israel and allow Israel the peace and security of a home of their own. Find them somewhere safe to live and prosper.
How many people look back at the forced relocation of Germans out of Eastern Europe [which was frankly deserved], or the Jews out of Arab nations [which was not] now from close to 80 years ago?
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
"Aren't doing themselves any favours" is in no way the same as being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. Eldorado didn't do the BBC any favours, but wasn't in breach of anything.
And Simpson's point clearly isn't that you "can't disapprove of decapitating babies". It's that you don't need to. You simply report what happened and the moral judgment is utterly obvious.
Like I say, I'd not take the same editorial approach as the BBC on this one. But it is easily within allowed boundaries and there is no question whatsoever of a breach of due impartiality in this case, nor any other breach. The KCs know this.
Simpson's problem is he hasn't always done this, he has engaged in the use of these terms before.....as have the BBC.
In reality, we all know what is really going on, they are shit scared of upsetting a small group of people over a conflict that has gone on forever and no sign it will ever stop. Same with all the celebs keeping their heads down when they are normally super quick to have their I support the latest cause flag on their twitter pic. Some might suggest its cowardice.
You only have to compare the usual I stand with Ukraine, France after Bataclan, etc etc etc, none are doing that for Israel.
But the KCs writing to Ofcom is nonsense.
This whole dare call it terrorism debate is misguided. It's not terrorism, it's war. To call it terrorism is an understatement.
War criminals seems the best descriptor imo for the little its worth. But as per normal it is the self defined defenders of free speech who seem most put out by someone else using different words to those they would use themselves.
I have very little care what words the BBC chooses to use. News reporting terminology is not a very big deal.
However, the explanation of their editorial choice was clearly nonsense given past examples to the contrary, and that makes it more interesting. It reasonably invites further questions on their choices if it has not been their consistent position.
So whilst going to OfCom etc is silly, I see no issue with people saying "you've used term x before without attribution despite saying that is not your policy: can you explain why?"
I think FrancisUrquhart has it right that we know what is really going on, and the lack of consistency demonstrates that.
It's editorial guidance. Clearly they will, from time to time, be inconsistent. I happen to disagree with their not using "terrorist" in this case - but I don't think it's particularly important.
As for "we know what's going on", that's just projection. What is actually means is "I am convinced this is their particular motivation".
Yes, because that's what the evidence is.
Hamas are literally conducting the most vile terrorism and are legally on the proscribed terrorist list - but the Beeb won't call them terrorists despite using the word in other situations?
There's no excuse for that, its pure prejudice.
It's probably seen as being 'complicated' because Hamas claim they are a government. It'd be a bit like Sinn Fein being in power in Eire, whilst also openly running the IRA's campaign against the UK.
I wonder if that makes Israel's position a little easier? If Hamas is just a terrorist group, Israeli attacks on Gaza might hit non-terrorists. If Hamas are the government, then it's a war. P'haps.
But anyway, IMV Hamas are a government *and* terrorists...
I think the duality does help Israel and it’s rhetorically useful for its more unequivocal supporters. Call Hamas a terrorist group (100% true) and this rebuts any equivalence between their actions and the actions of the Israeli military. It frames the conflict as a simple right vs wrong affair, a democratic state defending itself against the terrorists who have attacked it.
At the same time call Hamas the government of Gaza (true and not true), then the terrorists become Palestinian forces and the enemy is now not just a terrorist group but a place and a people - Gaza and its population. This is who Israel is at war with. In which case it’s easier to try and justify the horror unleashed on them with things like WW2 comparisons.
Except of course the world has moved on from WW2 - at least in terms of internationally understood legality. Many of the things done by the Allies in WW2 would now be clearly defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 'civilised' world of democracies and freedoms has tried to learn the lessons of WW2 and has put in place rules to limit what is considered acceptable. The constant use of WW2 as a reference point for attacks on civilians is as obsolete as claiming that the use of chemical weapons should be acceptable because we all used them in WW1.
Last month over 100k Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were forced out while the world did nothing.
Previous to that Nagorno-Karabakh was blockaded for months with food, energy and medical supplies being stopped while the world did nothing.
Yep and those were crimes in my eyes and I assume yours. But that is a classic case of what-aboutism. Do we use the argument that because one crime is commited and not successfully prosecuted, all other similar crimes should be ignored?
No, we accept there is a difference between what people on the internet say what the 'rules' are and what someone can get away with in reality.
And just as Azerbaijan took a realistic decision on the cost/benefit of its ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh compared to the cost/benefit of the status quo then Israel will be doing likewise regarding Gaza.
So people on the internet viewing Israeli actions as a war crime will be a definite cost to Israel but does it alter the cost/benefit equations enough ?
2,000,000 refugees on Israels border! It won't be war crimes they'll have to worry about.
So drive them away from the border and find them somewhere else safe to be instead and the problem goes away.
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
It does seem a bit bonkers seeing as we're basically now down to the "Proper" companies and all the Zebras, Flow energies, isupplyenergies and 101 other minnows went bust a while back.
There are still some around - eg Utility Warehouse.
But I haven't looked - currently I'm quite happy with Octopus, and am considering their 1 year fix.
The more news comes out about the Israel - Hamas war, the greater my feeling that Israel has license to do something generational.
Some debate about what to call Hamas. They are the government of Gaza and a declaration of war has formally been made. Israel sees Hamas as terrorists and they are, but they are also a government - hence the declaration of war.
Legally that makes it people combatants, not terrorists. Israel is therefore now under the international rules of war - as are Hamas. Whilst people are warning Israel not to act illegally, the same is now true of Hamas. And whilst Hamas combatants kidnap, rape and behead, and see martyrdom as a goal, there should be little objection to Israel's actions.
Prisoners have rights in war. But not lunatics trying to kill everyone including themselves. Gaza's civilians need more consideration, but the enemy are hiding amongst and embedded within those civilians. As so many Israeli military leaders are saying, once you go in you have to assume that everyone is a combatant and every object a bomb - because in the past they have been. Self-defence is just and legal in war, even at individual level...
The laws of war don’t apply for just declared wars. All armed conflict included.
The original Hague convention was written with input from British officers who had served on the frontline in Afghanistan. It was designed to regulate non state and semi state groups from the beginning.
Hama easily meet the test for being an organised party in the conflict - Command structure etc.
I appreciate the broadening of my understanding! Either way, there are rules. Which Hamas are not remotely respecting.
The curious thing is that suggesting the Laws of War should be used against non-state actors in the modern era hits a strange wall.
I asked some activist lawyer types about prosecuting Begum as a war criminal (which she is). I was told the idea is appalling, disgusting etc. But they couldn't seem to explain why.
That’s always struck me as strange also.
If the Laws of Armed Conflict apply to States and those who serve them, then they should also to those non-State organisations that fight them.
The very fact that they are not in uniform ought, of itself, to be treated as a war crime.
That would make every resistance group in every occupied country in the world guilty of war crimes.
And which is why the Laws of War, quite specifically, don't do that.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
The Germans persuaded themselves that they were undefeated, and the nationalists sought scapegoats.
Germany lost territories in places where the population had no desire at all to be part of Germany. The Germans thought that was all very unfair, but we have no reason to agree with them. The reparations imposed upon Germany were lower (in terms of share of national income) than those they imposed upon France in 1871.
Danzig and Memel were the only real legitimate grievances that the Germans had.
You conveniently ignore the far more important economic sanctions against them - something that Keynes at the time warned would be impossible for them to meet and would lead to the disintegration of Europe.
"The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it from every point of view except that of the economic future of the states whose destiny they were handling."
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
Yes. I haven't ever advocated anarchy, I advocate zonal planning. Which contrary to what @Richard_Tyndall keeps claiming is not what we have in this country.
In a sensible zonal system, like Japan, you can build whatever you want subject without asking permission first if three conditions are met.
1. You own the land (obviously) 2. It is already zoned for housing. 3. You build to building codes.
Neighbours or Councils don't get a say if you want to demolish your home and rebuild it to something else as it's already zoned.
Plan the public infrastructure absolutely. But the land zoned for housing is NOT the public infrastructure land. Leave that to fill in with whatever people want.
The comment I have is that you purport to be in favour of a radical reform of planning in your posts but when it comes down to it, all you are actually arguing for is for more land to be released for housing (something almost everyone who works in the area agrees with- but subject to it being the right land in the right place which is more difficult to resolve) and a different delivery mechanism - a code based system rather than a discretionary system - something that is also not that controversial to deal with in principle, until you start trying to work out what the code should and shouldn't allow, and how deviations are resolved.
The problem with the last 13 years of planning policy is that the government don't want to tackle difficult decisions about where growth goes, they just keep avoiding it - palming it off to someone else, local authorities, civil servants etc... the Labour party seem to be making the right noises , but lets see.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
But how could Versailles have been softer ?
Allow Germany to keep Alsace-Lorraine or Polish inhabited territory in the east ?
Both ridiculous and wrong.
The reparations weren't paid and the military restrictions were evaded.
The likelihood is that Germany was always going to come for a rematch when the strategic situation suited it.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The peace imposed on Germany after WW2 was far harsher than Versailles.
Yet it is Versailles which is deemed too harsh.
Not really no. We rebuilt Germany after WW2 - for purely selfish reasons - and also forgave them most of their debt at the 1950 London conference. Whilst we completely restructured their state we did so whilst making sure we improved the lives of their citizenry and gave them the chance to see what it was like to enjoy the benefits and responsibilities fo a free and democratic state.
Fifteen years after the end of WW2 West Germany - or at least its peoples - was in a far better place than it had been 15 years after WW1.
Yes, but how much of that was owing to the worldwide economic depression ?
Absent that, would Versailles have had the same effect ?
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Another day of massive Russian casualties in Ukraine.
990 have been supported have been supported by personnel losses, 42 tanks, 44 armoured personnel vehicles, 32 artillery.
If those are the Ukrainian government figures, they don't mean very much. Though they are less fantastic than Russia's.
And there has certainly been some fierce fighting over the last few days.
The Ukrainian numbers might be considerable overcounting - but there really isn't that much evidence of it. At least two-thirds of their numbers have been supported by independent verification (although Oryx's roll in that is at an end). There is also anecdotal stuff that Ukrainians have a mass of footage that hasn't been put in the public domain, for whatever reason. But knock off even a third and these still represent massive damage to the Russian reserves of manpower and vehicles, especially as this is the second day of it.
I think the reason for the increased casualties of the last few days is the Russians turning from defence to offensive in Avdiivka.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Bodycount is not a reliable metric. It is difficult to assess even if conducted carefully. But it usually isn't and it's also liable to overcounting. We keep doing this again and again and it never works. It's even bloody difficult to do a bodycount of your own side. People do not have little implanted life markers that show up as red dots on a screen that fade out when they die.
One metric I've seen used in this war - and which I cannot remember seeing before - is using satellites designed to detect forest fires to detect where the conflict is occurring. It does not tell the whole story, but I bet it's useful to show where things are happening, and day-to-day changes.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
Yes. I haven't ever advocated anarchy, I advocate zonal planning. Which contrary to what @Richard_Tyndall keeps claiming is not what we have in this country.
In a sensible zonal system, like Japan, you can build whatever you want subject without asking permission first if three conditions are met.
1. You own the land (obviously) 2. It is already zoned for housing. 3. You build to building codes.
Neighbours or Councils don't get a say if you want to demolish your home and rebuild it to something else as it's already zoned.
Plan the public infrastructure absolutely. But the land zoned for housing is NOT the public infrastructure land. Leave that to fill in with whatever people want.
The comment I have is that you purport to be in favour of a radical reform of planning in your posts but when it comes down to it, all you are actually arguing for is for more land to be released for housing (something almost everyone who works in the area agrees with- but subject to it being the right land in the right place which is more difficult to resolve) and a different delivery mechanism - a code based system rather than a discretionary system - something that is also not that controversial to deal with in principle, until you start trying to work out what the code should and shouldn't allow, and how deviations are resolved.
The problem with the last 13 years of planning policy is that the government don't want to tackle difficult decisions about where growth goes, they just keep avoiding it - palming it off to someone else, local authorities, civil servants etc... the Labour party seem to be making the right noises , but lets see.
I don't consider zonal planning a radical concept whatsoever.
But to switch from our current system where politicians and neighbours and assorted NIMBYs get a say in blocking development, to one where they don't, would have radical consequences.
It would end the oligopoly of developers that can play the system to acquire and sit on consent (especially but not only if done in conjunction with a switch to LVT). It would allow more variety in what is built, rather than what is It would allow adaptability as if higher density housing for example were desired people could bulldoze low density housing and rebuild to higher density, without having to get their neighbours or Councillors to approve. It would mean politicians would no longer have to appeal or pander to NIMBYs as codes being set nationally and zoning being approved locally means they have no more input after its zoned.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The peace imposed on Germany after WW2 was far harsher than Versailles.
Yet it is Versailles which is deemed too harsh.
Not really no. We rebuilt Germany after WW2 - for purely selfish reasons - and also forgave them most of their debt at the 1950 London conference. Whilst we completely restructured their state we did so whilst making sure we improved the lives of their citizenry and gave them the chance to see what it was like to enjoy the benefits and responsibilities fo a free and democratic state.
Fifteen years after the end of WW2 West Germany - or at least its peoples - was in a far better place than it had been 15 years after WW1.
Yes, but how much of that was owing to the worldwide economic depression ?
Absent that, would Versailles have had the same effect ?
Yes. The reparations being demanded were unsustainable even if the Depression had not happened. People like Keynes knew and warned of this at the time even though they had no idea the Great Depression was coming. The short sightedness of Versaille (along with the betrayal of various ethnic groups in the name of maintaining European empires) makes it one of the greatest mistakes of the 20th century.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Well done.... I had a similar victory a couple of years ago. Put a lot of work in to the statement. I think it was a wise claims handler who pursued it on our behalf after being told many times that because we it was a certain type of accident we were automatically at fault. What I just found really annoying was being told by everyone that we were at fault when we weren't.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
What damns the Soviet expermient is (a) it failed and (b) its achievements were so much less impressive than those of its capitalist rivals.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Johnson was at the helm, he and Hancock especially were mostly concerned about how they were being perceived. We had government by Twitter. Not follow the science but follow what folk are saying about us. Vanity over principle. We know this now through the leaked WhatsApp messages but some of us including you and me perceived it very early on.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Some of us actually like to be able to access stuff on foot, you know. Not like ****ing LA without the sun.
And some of us actually don't.
Some of us actually want our home to be a quiet residential area with a street our children can play football or ride their bikes on, and a private back or front garden our kids can play on.
So allow both. If people choose to go live in a compact city, I'm entirely fine with that. And if people choose to live in suburbia, I'm entirely fine with that too.
We don't need one size fits all. Let people choose.
PS people's demands can change too, and they can move as appropriate. As a student I loved living in a city, and going clubbing at night. My clubbing data are long behind me, I have no interest in that anymore. Now my family is what matters.
But - and I'm trying to tread carefully here, because you're being super-reasonable; I'm not saying you're wrong, just that my preferences are different - I'm probably at a similar life stage to you, and I value that my kids have access to all the opportunities an urban area affords them and that they can reach them without me having to ferry them there in a car - because we live in an area which is sufficiently high density to be able to support a good quality public transport offer. I would sacrifice a large garden for a good park close by. I would sacrifice 'quiet' for good quality public transport. If it were just me, I'd live in Windermere. I'd sacrifice accessibility to a city centre for accessibility to a national park, while still living in a functional town - albeit one offering far more than a town of that size normally would because of the tourism factor. And because the Lake District makes my heart sing with happiness. But I'm not sure it's the best place to bring up kids.
Actually, what I most want - even more than accessibility - is to live somewhere which makes my heart sing with happiness. Some urban areas have that (Didsbury), some small towns do (Windermere), some villages do (Newton in Bowland); some do not (Cheetham Hill, Skelmersdale, No Man's Heath). But that leads on to arguments about architecture and urban design and so on.
You're absolutely reasonable there too, no need to tread carefully.
The joy of freedom and choice is that everyone gets what they want that way. Want to move to a suburban sprawl, move there. Want to move to a compact city, move there. Want to live in a compact town, move there.
Horses for courses, variety is the spice of life, let everyone choose.
As Rochdale says [thank you for that], I'm all in favour of building public transport too. I'm not saying every town should be suburbia, I'm saying build all sorts of options - rails, motorways, trams, roads, cycle paths and let people choose where they want to live.
If we end the housing crisis and build millions more homes (we should be aiming for a million homes a year to be constructed in my view over the next decade to partially close our housing shortage and cope with population growth) then there will be options for people to choose a setting they prefer, rather than being dumped in the only thing they've got with no hope of deciding for themselves.
I am old enough to remember when Israel was being pressed to give up land for peace. Well it did that in Gaza. It gave up land. It removed the settlers. And what it got in return was Hamas and rockets and now massacres.
Israel has made many mistakes over the years. Netanyahu is unquestionably the wrong leader for it, especially at such a time. I fear that an invasion of Gaza now will be a strategic error and lead to all sorts of casualties for the innocent.
But the Palestinians have consistently made huge errors, the biggest one of all being their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas seeks the elimination of Israel and the killing of every Jew everywhere - not just in Israel. This is explicitly genocidal. There is no negotiation with such a movement. Eliminating it is the only answer. Just as we sought to eliminate Nazism and ISIS and other similar genocidal movements.
Those who worry about what happens next need to provide an alternative to Israel, one that will not make that country prey to genocidal maniacs. Lots of people are willing to speak hard truths to Israel about obeying the laws of war and civilian deaths and the rest of it. Very few are telling Hamas that it is their genocidal ideology which has brought Gaza to the point it is, that it is their deliberate policy of hiding amongst civilians which is putting Palestinians at risk, it is their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist which means there is not the remotest hope of starting any peace talks.
There is plenty of pressure which needs putting on Israel but Hamas must first be eliminated. It cannot - until it changes what it wants - be a player. It has taken itself outside the universe of civilised decency. So if invasion of Gaza is not the solution, what is? And if we don't have an alternative solution, then we can hardly be surprised if Israel does what it thinks necessary to save itself. What would we do were we in their position?
I sometimes feel that commentators are unwilling to provide or even begin to think about what an alternative might be because - after all the condemnations of Hamas - they give up at expecting anything better from the Palestinians and it is, after all, so much easier and more comfortable to revert to criticising Israel.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
But how could Versailles have been softer ?
Allow Germany to keep Alsace-Lorraine or Polish inhabited territory in the east ?
Both ridiculous and wrong.
The reparations weren't paid and the military restrictions were evaded.
The likelihood is that Germany was always going to come for a rematch when the strategic situation suited it.
You are aware that as part of the consequences of Versaille the French took over the main German industrial centres of the Ruhr (well beyond Alsace-Lorraine) and effectively removed them from the German economy? The reparations demanded by the victors were the equivalent of over $1 trillion in today's money. How on earth could any country ever be expected to repay that?
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
It does seem a bit bonkers seeing as we're basically now down to the "Proper" companies and all the Zebras, Flow energies, isupplyenergies and 101 other minnows went bust a while back.
There are still some around - eg Utility Warehouse.
But I haven't looked - currently I'm quite happy with Octopus, and am considering their 1 year fix.
Oh I'm currently gaming the system with them - got an EV that puts me on the Intelligent Octopus tariff and I'm going to add 12kwh of storage batteries which I'll charge overnight at the same time. That will mean 99% of my electricity needs will cost 7.5p per kwh...
And at that price actually putting solar panels on the house makes no sense at all...
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
I have missed much of the conversation here due to work and other commitments the last few days, but I have continued to notice in the tv and print new media a sense that this many Israeli dead justifies whatever comes next. But never, never, has the same been said about the number of Palestinians killed as a justification for Palestinian or Hamas reaction. There is an implicit suggestion, always, that Israeli lives matter in a way that Palestinian lives do not - and it is that what causes some people to, wrongly, support Hamas in moments like this.
The only way to stop the violence is for the state of Israel to stop corralling 2 million Palestinians into an open air prison in Gaza, and recognising that the oppression of the Palestinians is why Hamas have the power they do (as well as it being part of Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the possibility of a two state solution) . This is being published in Haaretz, and yet is somehow treated as unacceptable to discuss in the UK and US. When Owen Jones said this to Margaret Hodge on Sky News, he was told he was bringing up the same old issues, despite the fact that this violence didn't spring our of nowhere like Athena from the head of Zeus but has a root cause. The "free speech" Home Secretary wants people potentially arrested for flying the Palestinian flag - as if support for the Palestinian people is in and of itself support for Hamas. And no matter how many times people say that what Hamas did was morally indefensible, any time anyone tries to point out that it is materially understandable and arguably politically inevitable, they get told they are defending terrorists.
Obviously none of our words spilled into the void matter. But if dead Israeli children are unacceptable - and it is unacceptable - so are dead Palestinian children. And yet every time I turn on the news someone is defending actions that were, rightly, called war crimes when done by Russia to Ukraine; or someone saying that violence against civilians is never acceptable, and that's why Israel must be allowed to defend itself by... targeting civilian areas of Gaza; that Israel has a right to exist, but really, why can't all 2 million Palestinians just move into Egypt or other nearby countries, as if the same decision that made Israel was not also supposed to create Palestinian states. It has been Israeli policy for years to "mow the grass" in Palestine - creating the sense of perpetual war - and yet it must be Hamas who is the sole wrongdoer in the conflict. Well, they aren't. Even after the atrocities last weekend and throughout this week, and they are atrocities, Israeli have also done atrocities and we need to recognise that. If we don't we're writing a blank cheque for wiping out every Palestinian.
I will probably get shot down by the usual suspects for liking this but what you say are uncomfortable truths. But do be prepared for a lot of anger.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
My own view of Versaiiles, and subsequently, is that Germany got off fairly lightly.
The you are blind to the fact that there is a direct causal link between what happened at Versaille and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi era.
But how could Versailles have been softer ?
Allow Germany to keep Alsace-Lorraine or Polish inhabited territory in the east ?
Both ridiculous and wrong.
The reparations weren't paid and the military restrictions were evaded.
The likelihood is that Germany was always going to come for a rematch when the strategic situation suited it.
Versailles could have been softer by all the imperial nations accepting their own culpability in the horrors of the war and instead of making Germany their scapegoat, they could have all worked together to make a more equitable Europe (and world). Was that likely, no - the other European states were also horrible egoists with colonies who did not care about the wellbeing of people. Did the German state react perfectly - also no, because the German state is still made out of individuals and some of those individuals (like the guy who was supposed to negotiate the surrender to the other European powers) fucked up. Should land have been ceded? I'm all for self determination, but again, European powers were not - if people in those areas wanted to be in specific countries (or not) let them vote on it. They could have also done more to integrate Germany into European partnerships and not leave it to the mercy of the army structure who essentially ran the joint during WW1, a group of people who would never accept responsibility or work with anyone to the left of the Kaiser.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Johnson was at the helm, he and Hancock especially were mostly concerned about how they were being perceived. We had government by Twitter. Not follow the science but follow what folk are saying about us. Vanity over principle. We know this now through the leaked WhatsApp messages but some of us including you and me perceived it very early on.
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Well done.... I had a similar victory a couple of years ago. Put a lot of work in to the statement. I think it was a wise claims handler who pursued it on our behalf after being told many times that because we it was a certain type of accident we were automatically at fault. What I just found really annoying was being told by everyone that we were at fault when we weren't.
I've not had an accident here for over 30 years but had a minor one in the States a few years ago in a rental car.
Reversing out of a parking space in a car park, slowly and taking care as always, a car suddenly drove into me causing a tiny blemish to his bumper and no damage to my rental. He insisted on calling the police because I wouldn't cough up the 100 dollars he was demanding in cash. I think it was a scam.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Johnson was at the helm, he and Hancock especially were mostly concerned about how they were being perceived. We had government by Twitter. Not follow the science but follow what folk are saying about us. Vanity over principle. We know this now through the leaked WhatsApp messages but some of us including you and me perceived it very early on.
The lockdown parties, as well as Sir Keir’s curry, proved that politicians, & those who worked for them, weren’t that scared of catching covid, and we could have had a less draconian reaction to it all - yet no one who was pro lockdown seems to have shifted an inch
Now the country is skint on the back of shutting it down, paying people not to work etc, and the same people who demanded it are asking where the money for public services is!
"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed but in every case it is someone else's blood . That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything."
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
I cant get anywhere near that, certainly not in the period outlined.
On how many levels is this totally insane? The concept, the amount, the reporting,...
The reporting should REALLY REALLY specify the time period in the headline. £17 a year is quite different to the £17 a month I was half expecting when I clicked the link.
Is it a flat rate £17 or is that just what the mythical 'average bill' be charged?
But more importantly, as Richard T points out, Why TF should we be bailing out energy companies? Are Centrica, EDF, EON, OVO, Scottish Power, all in danger of going bust?
It does seem a bit bonkers seeing as we're basically now down to the "Proper" companies and all the Zebras, Flow energies, isupplyenergies and 101 other minnows went bust a while back.
There are still some around - eg Utility Warehouse.
But I haven't looked - currently I'm quite happy with Octopus, and am considering their 1 year fix.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Absolutely but your audience is wrong. Just about everyone on PB condemned out of hand as fanciful and insane if not near-murderous even to whisper the idea that lockdowns were bad for a huge number of reasons including financial ones.
I'm sure your post won't get many likes and anyone who agrees with you should look carefully at their own posting history to see how they responded at the time.
I keep banging on about it (this is, after all, PB) but only @contrarian consistently stated what a calamity lockdown was and would be and boy was he right.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Do you agree with getting bus services back to 2010 levels?
Seizure of assets of directors of bankrupt energy firms might be a better safeguard.
Limited liability for directors often means unlimited liability for taxpayers.
We made a massive mistake as a country by not letting banks go bust in 2008. The Government should have protected deposits and put in place systems for the transfer of business to other banks but as far as the institutions themselves and their shareholders were concerned they should have been allowed to fail.
Completely 100% agreed. 👍
We should have done an Iceland. Buyer beware, if you invest in something your investment can go down (or be wiped out) as well as up.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Johnson was at the helm, he and Hancock especially were mostly concerned about how they were being perceived. We had government by Twitter. Not follow the science but follow what folk are saying about us. Vanity over principle. We know this now through the leaked WhatsApp messages but some of us including you and me perceived it very early on.
The lockdown parties, as well as Sir Keir’s curry, proved that politicians & those who worked for them, weren’t that scared of catching covid, and we could have had a less draconian reaction to it all - yet no one who was pro lockdown seems to have shifted an inch
Now the country is skint on the back of shutting it down, paying people not to work etc, and the same people who demanded it are asking where the money for public services is!
about the only bit of good news is those that messed the whole thing up now have to live with their actions and sort their own mess out.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
It was, of course, the US that gave Russia its industry.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
Yes. I haven't ever advocated anarchy, I advocate zonal planning. Which contrary to what @Richard_Tyndall keeps claiming is not what we have in this country.
In a sensible zonal system, like Japan, you can build whatever you want subject without asking permission first if three conditions are met.
1. You own the land (obviously) 2. It is already zoned for housing. 3. You build to building codes.
Neighbours or Councils don't get a say if you want to demolish your home and rebuild it to something else as it's already zoned.
Plan the public infrastructure absolutely. But the land zoned for housing is NOT the public infrastructure land. Leave that to fill in with whatever people want.
The comment I have is that you purport to be in favour of a radical reform of planning in your posts but when it comes down to it, all you are actually arguing for is for more land to be released for housing (something almost everyone who works in the area agrees with- but subject to it being the right land in the right place which is more difficult to resolve) and a different delivery mechanism - a code based system rather than a discretionary system - something that is also not that controversial to deal with in principle, until you start trying to work out what the code should and shouldn't allow, and how deviations are resolved.
The problem with the last 13 years of planning policy is that the government don't want to tackle difficult decisions about where growth goes, they just keep avoiding it - palming it off to someone else, local authorities, civil servants etc... the Labour party seem to be making the right noises , but lets see.
I don't consider zonal planning a radical concept whatsoever.
But to switch from our current system where politicians and neighbours and assorted NIMBYs get a say in blocking development, to one where they don't, would have radical consequences.
It would end the oligopoly of developers that can play the system to acquire and sit on consent (especially but not only if done in conjunction with a switch to LVT). It would allow more variety in what is built, rather than what is It would allow adaptability as if higher density housing for example were desired people could bulldoze low density housing and rebuild to higher density, without having to get their neighbours or Councillors to approve. It would mean politicians would no longer have to appeal or pander to NIMBYs as codes being set nationally and zoning being approved locally means they have no more input after its zoned.
You may be interested to hear that our house in Finland is in a zoning system. We cannot cut down a tree in the garden without permission. The guy across the road is trying to do a self build and has been waiting for 10 months for permission to knock down the existing building and because the new house is 1m higher than the code allows. And of course, in these established built up areas there are exactly the same grievances and arguments between neighbours, they don't disappear with a code system.
The code system works and it doesn't. On the other hand a relative built an entire housing estate on his farm over the course of about 5 years through a code based system selling the plots off individually. But the latter happened not just because of the code system, also because there is unlimited land in Finland to build on and a low population density and no opposition, also because the Finns keep on top of building new infrastructure, unlike the UK. They've also made mistakes in Finland with too liberal code based systems on similar estates, there are estates where opportunistic developers have crammed in too many single storey houses with no space/gardens, it is the cheapest, poor quality type of development, something must have gone wrong with the plot/space ratios. In our relatives case he thinks it worked better because he employed a landscape architect to design the layout, but that was his choice (and expense)
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Do you agree with getting bus services back to 2010 levels?
If latent demands is there, then absolutely of course, then the bus operating firms should invest in more buses to attract more customers.
If the demand isn't there? That's their choice.
Of course building more roads allows more routes buses can take.
If there's any infrastructure that's missing that prevents buses from operating, eg like roads, then of course that should be invested in. If all the infrastructure is there but the buses aren't operating anyway because of a lack of demand, then that's no different to cars not driving because of a lack of demand.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Absolutely but your audience is wrong. Just about everyone on PB condemned out of hand as fanciful and insane if not near-murderous even to whisper the idea that lockdowns were bad for a huge number of reasons including financial ones.
I'm sure your post won't get many likes and anyone who agrees with you should look carefully at their own posting history to see how they responded at the time.
I keep banging on about it (this is, after all, PB) but only @contrarian consistently stated what a calamity lockdown was and would be and boy was he right.
There were plenty saying that Starmer was wrong to go harder, longer on lockdowns. We would have lost another Christmas if it had been down to him.
This is the man man would now have as PM? Colour me unconvinced...
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
It's just made up twaddle.
My bad. It would imply that the British killed off one third to forty per cent of India's population, in just 39 years.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
What is your evidence that the British Empire killed 100 million people between 1881 and 1920?
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Some of us actually like to be able to access stuff on foot, you know. Not like ****ing LA without the sun.
And some of us actually don't.
Some of us actually want our home to be a quiet residential area with a street our children can play football or ride their bikes on, and a private back or front garden our kids can play on.
So allow both. If people choose to go live in a compact city, I'm entirely fine with that. And if people choose to live in suburbia, I'm entirely fine with that too.
We don't need one size fits all. Let people choose.
PS people's demands can change too, and they can move as appropriate. As a student I loved living in a city, and going clubbing at night. My clubbing data are long behind me, I have no interest in that anymore. Now my family is what matters.
But - and I'm trying to tread carefully here, because you're being super-reasonable; I'm not saying you're wrong, just that my preferences are different - I'm probably at a similar life stage to you, and I value that my kids have access to all the opportunities an urban area affords them and that they can reach them without me having to ferry them there in a car - because we live in an area which is sufficiently high density to be able to support a good quality public transport offer. I would sacrifice a large garden for a good park close by. I would sacrifice 'quiet' for good quality public transport. If it were just me, I'd live in Windermere. I'd sacrifice accessibility to a city centre for accessibility to a national park, while still living in a functional town - albeit one offering far more than a town of that size normally would because of the tourism factor. And because the Lake District makes my heart sing with happiness. But I'm not sure it's the best place to bring up kids.
Actually, what I most want - even more than accessibility - is to live somewhere which makes my heart sing with happiness. Some urban areas have that (Didsbury), some small towns do (Windermere), some villages do (Newton in Bowland); some do not (Cheetham Hill, Skelmersdale, No Man's Heath). But that leads on to arguments about architecture and urban design and so on.
Didsbury makes your heart “sing with happiness”?
😶
It sounds unlikely. But I’ve never been. Seems I should amend that
Didsbury is surprisingly attractive to my memory; it has that prosperous London village feel to it. Like those London villages it may not have the most glorious vistas but what it does have is a quietly prosperous feel to the place - pubs, shops, cafés, well built houses, parks. All the things the Victorians liked to build.
But all I have is hazy youthful impressions - I never actually lived there.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
Ideally, yes - but again I understand that in the political practicalities of the world we live in that self-determination is a better option than politicians slicing up countries and moving borders based on what they want.
Lots of places did not have borders in the way we conceive of them in the modern sense, and if they did they were much more permeable, compared to what we have now.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Absolutely but your audience is wrong. Just about everyone on PB condemned out of hand as fanciful and insane if not near-murderous even to whisper the idea that lockdowns were bad for a huge number of reasons including financial ones.
I'm sure your post won't get many likes and anyone who agrees with you should look carefully at their own posting history to see how they responded at the time.
I keep banging on about it (this is, after all, PB) but only @contrarian consistently stated what a calamity lockdown was and would be and boy was he right.
There were plenty saying that Starmer was wrong to go harder, longer on lockdowns. We would have lost another Christmas if it had been down to him.
This is the man man would now have as PM? Colour me unconvinced...
Yes there was nowhere to go. But just about everyone on here was agitating for longer and harder lockdowns and excoriated the likes of contrarian at the time of his posting.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Do you agree with getting bus services back to 2010 levels?
If latent demands is there, then absolutely of course, then the bus operating firms should invest in more buses to attract more customers.
If the demand isn't there? That's their choice.
Of course building more roads allows more routes buses can take.
If there's any infrastructure that's missing that prevents buses from operating, eg like roads, then of course that should be invested in. If all the infrastructure is there but the buses aren't operating anyway because of a lack of demand, then that's no different to cars not driving because of a lack of demand.
What do you think the buses were doing before 2010? Going off-road?
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
Looks like bullshit to me. Life expectancy declining from 26 to 21? Pretty shit all round then.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
What is your evidence that the British Empire killed 100 million people between 1881 and 1920?
I provided the link in a later post - a study looking at census data, somewhat similar to methods used when calculating body counts of other regimes like the USSR.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
Yes. I haven't ever advocated anarchy, I advocate zonal planning. Which contrary to what @Richard_Tyndall keeps claiming is not what we have in this country.
In a sensible zonal system, like Japan, you can build whatever you want subject without asking permission first if three conditions are met.
1. You own the land (obviously) 2. It is already zoned for housing. 3. You build to building codes.
Neighbours or Councils don't get a say if you want to demolish your home and rebuild it to something else as it's already zoned.
Plan the public infrastructure absolutely. But the land zoned for housing is NOT the public infrastructure land. Leave that to fill in with whatever people want.
The comment I have is that you purport to be in favour of a radical reform of planning in your posts but when it comes down to it, all you are actually arguing for is for more land to be released for housing (something almost everyone who works in the area agrees with- but subject to it being the right land in the right place which is more difficult to resolve) and a different delivery mechanism - a code based system rather than a discretionary system - something that is also not that controversial to deal with in principle, until you start trying to work out what the code should and shouldn't allow, and how deviations are resolved.
The problem with the last 13 years of planning policy is that the government don't want to tackle difficult decisions about where growth goes, they just keep avoiding it - palming it off to someone else, local authorities, civil servants etc... the Labour party seem to be making the right noises , but lets see.
I don't consider zonal planning a radical concept whatsoever.
But to switch from our current system where politicians and neighbours and assorted NIMBYs get a say in blocking development, to one where they don't, would have radical consequences.
It would end the oligopoly of developers that can play the system to acquire and sit on consent (especially but not only if done in conjunction with a switch to LVT). It would allow more variety in what is built, rather than what is It would allow adaptability as if higher density housing for example were desired people could bulldoze low density housing and rebuild to higher density, without having to get their neighbours or Councillors to approve. It would mean politicians would no longer have to appeal or pander to NIMBYs as codes being set nationally and zoning being approved locally means they have no more input after its zoned.
You may be interested to hear that our house in Finland is in a zoning system. We cannot cut down a tree in the garden without permission. The guy across the road is trying to do a self build and has been waiting for 10 months for permission to knock down the existing building and because the new house is 1m higher than the code allows. And of course, in these established built up areas there are exactly the same grievances and arguments between neighbours, they don't disappear with a code system.
The code system works and it doesn't. On the other hand a relative built an entire housing estate on his farm over the course of about 5 years through a code based system selling the plots off individually. But the latter happened not just because of the code system, also because there is unlimited land in Finland to build on and a low population density and no opposition, also because the Finns keep on top of building new infrastructure, unlike the UK. They've also made mistakes in Finland with too liberal code based systems on similar estates, there are estates where opportunistic developers have crammed in too many single storey houses with no space/gardens, it is the cheapest, poor quality type of development, something must have gone wrong with the plot/space ratios. In our relatives case he thinks it worked better because he employed a landscape architect to design the layout, but that was his choice (and expense)
If its already zoned for residential then I'm proposing abolishing seeking permission [except for special circumstances, like listed buildings]. So if the guy across the road is waiting for permission, then that's not a pure zonal system like I propose.
Absolutely agreed that low density is better, hence the parallel conversation about transport. Some people prefer high density though, so if they do then there should be freedom to do that too.
Of course if we have enough houses able to be built, and a liberal zone/code based system then situations where some developments are badly designed while others are well designed, may mean that the well designed developments are sold and lived in while the badly designed ones may end up vacant and be a burden on the owner who badly designed them as nobody is forced to buy or let them given better alternatives and the stupid owner who screwed up needs to continue paying all taxes on the land himself rather than getting an income from those who have no better alternative.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
It's just made up twaddle.
My bad. It would imply that the British killed off one third to forty per cent of India's population, in just 39 years.
13 years of Tory government and the criminal justice system has collapsed.
Even if your rapist is convicted, they still won't go to prison because there is no space.
May as well not bother having trials. Or reporting crimes. If the state won't do its job and protect us, we'll have to revert to older forms of self-protection.
Bastards.
We haven’t had mail delivered for two weeks. That’s such a trivial thing in comparison to everything else, but it seems to typify the country today.
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule? All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
It’s incredible that people don’t mention the part that closing everything down for lockdown has played in ruining the country’s finances. All major parties were behind it, Labour wanted to lockdown harder for longer (the non existent threat of the ‘Johnson Variant” in the Summer of 21).
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
Absolutely but your audience is wrong. Just about everyone on PB condemned out of hand as fanciful and insane if not near-murderous even to whisper the idea that lockdowns were bad for a huge number of reasons including financial ones.
I'm sure your post won't get many likes and anyone who agrees with you should look carefully at their own posting history to see how they responded at the time.
I keep banging on about it (this is, after all, PB) but only @contrarian consistently stated what a calamity lockdown was and would be and boy was he right.
There were plenty saying that Starmer was wrong to go harder, longer on lockdowns. We would have lost another Christmas if it had been down to him.
This is the man man would now have as PM? Colour me unconvinced...
“Johnson Variant” - what a prat. Completely wrong too. Still, at least he’s boring
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Well done. I am having similar fun and games with insurers after a tractor and trailor skidded downhill to a halt on my side of the road, having been stopped by my car's bonnet. Farmer refuses to admit liability.
‘Eliminate them’: Republicans step up calls for action against Hamas
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/gop-rhetoric-hamas-00121051 Republicans are escalating their rhetoric to call for actions to “eliminate,” “eradicate” and “level” the Hamas militant group — no matter what it takes — as Washington plots more assistance to Israel in the wake of recent attacks.
“This is sick, and we have to treat sick people the way they deserve to be treated and eliminate them,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
“Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Tuesday night.
“Hamas must be eradicated & Israel must respond DISPROPORTIONATELY to this & to any futures attacks from any enemy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday...
Treating sick people the way they deserve to be treated by eliminating them is an interesting view.
I thought she was supposed to be the vaguely sane one.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Do you agree with getting bus services back to 2010 levels?
If latent demands is there, then absolutely of course, then the bus operating firms should invest in more buses to attract more customers.
If the demand isn't there? That's their choice.
Of course building more roads allows more routes buses can take.
If there's any infrastructure that's missing that prevents buses from operating, eg like roads, then of course that should be invested in. If all the infrastructure is there but the buses aren't operating anyway because of a lack of demand, then that's no different to cars not driving because of a lack of demand.
What do you think the buses were doing before 2010? Going off-road?
I don't know why demand has changed, you'll have to ask passengers why they aren't choosing to go on the bus.
Maybe they can afford a better alternative, like driving, so aren't forced to go on the bus due to a lack of a superior alternative? Who knows?
So long as options are available, that's all that matters. If people choose not to take a certain option, that's their choice.
Apart from school buses which are jam packed, almost all buses I see are nearly-empty. When I went on one recently there wasn't a single passenger on the bus when I got on, and when I got off there was only one other passenger on board. That may be why fewer are operating perhaps?
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
What is your evidence that the British Empire killed 100 million people between 1881 and 1920?
I provided the link in a later post - a study looking at census data, somewhat similar to methods used when calculating body counts of other regimes like the USSR.
I find it hard to believe without other evidence. In the USSR we had the holodomor in Ukraine, the gulags, the purges etc. In India there was a huge country with endemic poverty where the life expectancy was shit, and apparently became shitter because of Empire (although no evidence is shown to support that). I smell bullshit and would expect other historians to strongly disagree.
‘Eliminate them’: Republicans step up calls for action against Hamas
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/gop-rhetoric-hamas-00121051 Republicans are escalating their rhetoric to call for actions to “eliminate,” “eradicate” and “level” the Hamas militant group — no matter what it takes — as Washington plots more assistance to Israel in the wake of recent attacks.
“This is sick, and we have to treat sick people the way they deserve to be treated and eliminate them,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
“Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Tuesday night.
“Hamas must be eradicated & Israel must respond DISPROPORTIONATELY to this & to any futures attacks from any enemy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday...
Treating sick people the way they deserve to be treated by eliminating them is an interesting view.
I am old enough to remember when Israel was being pressed to give up land for peace. Well it did that in Gaza. It gave up land. It removed the settlers. And what it got in return was Hamas and rockets and now massacres.
Israel has made many mistakes over the years. Netanyahu is unquestionably the wrong leader for it, especially at such a time. I fear that an invasion of Gaza now will be a strategic error and lead to all sorts of casualties for the innocent.
But the Palestinians have consistently made huge errors, the biggest one of all being their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas seeks the elimination of Israel and the killing of every Jew everywhere - not just in Israel. This is explicitly genocidal. There is no negotiation with such a movement. Eliminating it is the only answer. Just as we sought to eliminate Nazism and ISIS and other similar genocidal movements.
Those who worry about what happens next need to provide an alternative to Israel, one that will not make that country prey to genocidal maniacs. Lots of people are willing to speak hard truths to Israel about obeying the laws of war and civilian deaths and the rest of it. Very few are telling Hamas that it is their genocidal ideology which has brought Gaza to the point it is, that it is their deliberate policy of hiding amongst civilians which is putting Palestinians at risk, it is their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist which means there is not the remotest hope of starting any peace talks.
There is plenty of pressure which needs putting on Israel but Hamas must first be eliminated. It cannot - until it changes what it wants - be a player. It has taken itself outside the universe of civilised decency. So if invasion of Gaza is not the solution, what is? And if we don't have an alternative solution, then we can hardly be surprised if Israel does what it thinks necessary to save itself. What would we do were we in their position?
I sometimes feel that commentators are unwilling to provide or even begin to think about what an alternative might be because - after all the condemnations of Hamas - they give up at expecting anything better from the Palestinians and it is, after all, so much easier and more comfortable to revert to criticising Israel.
I used to be really sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I’ve been to Israel maybe a dozen times and I’ve watched that country become crueller, more racist over time. Coarsened by its Occupations.
But now, today, when I look at Gaza I think “that’s sad and awful. But… they want to kill every Jew they find.”
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
It's just made up twaddle.
My bad. It would imply that the British killed off one third to forty per cent of India's population, in just 39 years.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Fair enough. It has to be said, the bus is an often-overlooked mode of transport and can often work out surprisingly efficient - both halves of this statement are especially true outside of big urban areas, where the lack of congestion can mean a well-planned bus journey is often just as quick as driving.
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Warrington is not a model that can be transposed on to more densely populated parts of the country, particularly not the south east. You can't just build 10 lane motorways through AONB's and National Parks, which is what would happen if you try and fulfil the demand for car use through building new roads, at some point you need to start reducing the demand for car use and developing other options (public transport) - something we realised about 30-40 years ago.
Also the situation in Warrington and this part of the north west is a product of town planning, not something that has happened because town planning has been swept away. All the roads, infrastructure to go with the housing have to be planned and co-ordinated, along with policies that direct growth to certain areas. You don't just create it by throwing up a few motorways and letting people build wherever they want on vaguely defined zones. Even if you create a zonal system, like Japan and many other countries in Europe, it still has to be planned, it is just a slightly different type of planning.
Yes. I haven't ever advocated anarchy, I advocate zonal planning. Which contrary to what @Richard_Tyndall keeps claiming is not what we have in this country.
In a sensible zonal system, like Japan, you can build whatever you want subject without asking permission first if three conditions are met.
1. You own the land (obviously) 2. It is already zoned for housing. 3. You build to building codes.
Neighbours or Councils don't get a say if you want to
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Do you agree with getting bus services back to 2010 levels?
If latent demands is there, then absolutely of course, then the bus operating firms should invest in more buses to attract more customers.
If the demand isn't there? That's their choice.
Of course building more roads allows more routes buses can take.
If there's any infrastructure that's missing that prevents buses from operating, eg like roads, then of course that should be invested in. If all the infrastructure is there but the buses aren't operating anyway because of a lack of demand, then that's no different to cars not driving because of a lack of demand.
What do you think the buses were doing before 2010? Going off-road?
I don't know why demand has changed, you'll have to ask passengers why they aren't choosing to go on the bus.
Maybe they can afford a better alternative, like driving, so aren't forced to go on the bus due to a lack of a superior alternative? Who knows?
So long as options are available, that's all that matters. If people choose not to take a certain option, that's their choice.
Probably because bus services have been cut 50%, prices have gone up, all while the costs of motoring have fallen.
Their "choice" has been restricted. For some people, their freedom to travel further than they can walk has been eliminated almost entirely.
That's why accessibility is such an important part of indexes if multiple deprivation. The young, the old and the poor.
I am old enough to remember when Israel was being pressed to give up land for peace. Well it did that in Gaza. It gave up land. It removed the settlers. And what it got in return was Hamas and rockets and now massacres.
Israel has made many mistakes over the years. Netanyahu is unquestionably the wrong leader for it, especially at such a time. I fear that an invasion of Gaza now will be a strategic error and lead to all sorts of casualties for the innocent.
But the Palestinians have consistently made huge errors, the biggest one of all being their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas seeks the elimination of Israel and the killing of every Jew everywhere - not just in Israel. This is explicitly genocidal. There is no negotiation with such a movement. Eliminating it is the only answer. Just as we sought to eliminate Nazism and ISIS and other similar genocidal movements.
Those who worry about what happens next need to provide an alternative to Israel, one that will not make that country prey to genocidal maniacs. Lots of people are willing to speak hard truths to Israel about obeying the laws of war and civilian deaths and the rest of it. Very few are telling Hamas that it is their genocidal ideology which has brought Gaza to the point it is, that it is their deliberate policy of hiding amongst civilians which is putting Palestinians at risk, it is their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist which means there is not the remotest hope of starting any peace talks.
There is plenty of pressure which needs putting on Israel but Hamas must first be eliminated. It cannot - until it changes what it wants - be a player. It has taken itself outside the universe of civilised decency. So if invasion of Gaza is not the solution, what is? And if we don't have an alternative solution, then we can hardly be surprised if Israel does what it thinks necessary to save itself. What would we do were we in their position?
I sometimes feel that commentators are unwilling to provide or even begin to think about what an alternative might be because - after all the condemnations of Hamas - they give up at expecting anything better from the Palestinians and it is, after all, so much easier and more comfortable to revert to criticising Israel.
I was saying something similar the other day. Gaza allows itself to be ruled by Hamas. It does this in the knowledge that Hamas is committed to the death of all Jews. The murderous assaults came from their territory and seem to have been a source of glee.
I fully get that the residents of Gaza have a terrible life, that they are economically repressed by Israel and made to beg for water and electricity. Israel’s policies have been unenlightened at best and self harming all too often. If I lived in Gaza I would hate the Israeli government and want to resist that oppression.
But if you want to be listened to, if you want things to change, you do not start with the beheading of babies because they are Jews.
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Well done. I am having similar fun and games with insurers after a tractor and trailor skidded downhill to a halt on my side of the road, having been stopped by my car's bonnet. Farmer refuses to admit liability.
That strikes me as an audacious claim by the farmer! Whose liability is it, if not his?
Uncle Barty always makes Warrington sound bloody awful, soulless identikit housing surrounded by motorways. I have been to Warrington, it’s not that bad in real life. At least not the bit I visited.
Hmm, a look at TripAdvisor throws up cultural activities like Zombie Scavenger Hunts (not sure if the undead are doinf the scavenging or being eaten), though there is a nice looking trad municipal museum with mummy and paintings and dino and all. Okay. Walton Hall is No 1 Best Thing to Do in Warrington, and the Museum is No 3., but it 's a bit worrying that Gullivers World Theme Park is no 2 and an alpaca farm is no 4. Really trad Lanc culture that, of a part with parkin and faggot and so on. It thins out a bit later, No 105 being a bcobblestoned street, which at least doesn't take long to inspect.
Of course people are mobile and via motorways you can get elsewhere within the NW within a very reasonable time too. Want to be in Liverpool, or Manchester, or Chester, or North Wales? All easily accessible.
"Of course people are mobile [...] via motorways [...]".
Lots of people don't have cars. As much reminded on here.
Not a problem.
There's these things called buses and coaches that can go on motorways for the small minority who have no access to private transport.
Maybe you have heard of them before?
Sadly, the cost of bus travel has increased even while fuel duty has been cut, punishing the disabled, poor and young.
That's if the bus actually exists. 1,500 routes have been cut just since 2021. 10% of all services were cut in the last year. 50% since 2010.
I extend a compromise - no new motorways until bus travel costs are cut to the same extent as fuel duty, and the number of services return to pre-2010 levels?
The one all-day last service through this small town was recently re-routed. We can get to Stansted Airport on one bus. However, getting to either of the two local hospitals requires two buses. We used to be able to get a bus directly to one.
Good morning to all. That’s a greeting, not a comment on the weather, grey and damp.
Good morning too. On the contrary, for a change in Scotland the weather here is bright and sunny, if chilly at night - have had to put the heating on briefly in the morning and evening as it was otherwise too cold for comfort at the desk all day.
Beautiful and Autumnal in South Manchester too. Off to Scotland in a week and a half (Dunkeld) - a few days like this would do very nicely.
Anyway, looking back up this thread - Bart is being a tad obtuse. You COULD get tge bus from Warrington to Manchester or Liverpool or Chester, but 99% of people making those journeys by public transport would take the train, what with Warrington also having really good rail connections to those places.
[Citation Needed] on 99% because the facts don't represent that I believe.
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Fair enough. It has to be said, the bus is an often-overlooked mode of transport and can often work out surprisingly efficient - both halves of this statement are especially true outside of big urban areas, where the lack of congestion can mean a well-planned bus journey is often just as quick as driving.
Buses reduce congestion, of course.
The most stupid people in the UK are drivers who oppose bus lanes.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
As a leftist I can say, honestly, that Stalinism is bad. The USSR was bad. The roughly 60 million killed in the 70 years between 1917 and 1987 was bad.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
Where does the 100 million come from ?
I guess if you add in WWI and subsequent epidemics, although I don't think they can be laid entirely at the door of the British Empire.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
That all seems pretty fanciful. That would imply that the British killed off 25% of India's population in those 39 years.
It's just made up twaddle.
My bad. It would imply that the British killed off one third to forty per cent of India's population, in just 39 years.
100 million in those forty years is a wild exaggeration, but might be close to the total numbers that died during famines under British rule in India from the C18th to the C20th. That forty year period doesn’t even include the “Great Famine” of 1876/1878 when 8million people are believed to have died.
Obviously a counter to that is that the region suffered famines long before British rule, but even a cursory reading of history reveals that famines under earlier British rule seem to have been much worse, often exacerbated by Imperial policies & taxes. Rather like the famine in Ireland in the C19th, British rulers seem to have cared little for the people they were notionally in charge of & were more interested in tax income than they were in saving lives.
Some good news! Those with long memories may recall me mentioning my involvement in a collision last September when another car drove into the side of me as I was reversing into my drive. Various posters were helpful and supportive - certainly there were helpful contributions from @ydoethur and @Stocky among others, for which I was very grateful. Anyway, I've just heard that, thirteen months after the incident after various wranglings between unmotivated solicitors from either side, the other party has admitted responsibilty. Hooray! How much of the excessive insurance premiums I've had to pay over the past year I'll get back, and whether I get my no claims bonus back, I don't know - but I have the warm feeling of being in the right. Phew!
Well done. I am having similar fun and games with insurers after a tractor and trailor skidded downhill to a halt on my side of the road, having been stopped by my car's bonnet. Farmer refuses to admit liability.
That strikes me as an audacious claim by the farmer! Whose liability is it, if not his?
Well quite! The skidmarks don't exactly help his case...thankfully had the presence of mind to photograph them.
Comments
It's nothing compared to schools literally falling down, seven million people on hospital waiting lists, ambulance waiting times leaping past three quarters of an hour, roads pocked with astonishing numbers of potholes everywhere, a massive and ongoing cost of living crisis, our courts backlogged so much that almost any case now takes literally years (three? four?) to come to trial while police ignore simple burglaries and bicycle thefts other than to give you a crime number for your insurance.
But now they can’t jail any more people, anyway. All in the face of the highest tax burden in generations. But billions have gone to scammers who happen to be friends to the ruling party.
Are Tories proud of this? Can they really go around with a straight face and ask the public to extend their rule?
All I see from them is the ultimate negativity of “oh, oh, the only other option might be worse!” Nothing positive. No vision for improvement. No vision for rectifying the decaying mess that has unfolded under their stewardship. Just a desperate reliance upon fear and first-past-the-post.
Many do neither.
Which comes back to your point that it surprising that there should be this reluctance to prosecute them for war crimes.
*Seal clap thing*
What we see from Russia is typical deflection: accusing the enemy of performing the atrocities you have just committed. Hamas will do exactly the same. "See! They're just as bad as us!"
Thankfully, the bad guys in the Ukraine<->Russia conflict are much easier to discern than those in Palestine<->Israel. For everyone except (un)committed idiots.
If some groups are suffering higher inflation than the official number then other groups must be experiencing lower inflation.
So if both the poor and the super rich have higher than average inflation then much of those in between must have been benefiting from lower than average inflation.
The problem with Gaza is this. If the blockade of the port were lifted, and Gazans were free to live and work in other countries, including Israel and Egpyt, those other countries would face terrorism at the hands of some of Gaza's people.
One could argue that's a price worth paying, to make life better for Gaza's people, but I doubt if it's something that any government could sell to its own voters.
It does not justify nor defend the Hamas actions but this idea that we can take a single incident, however horrific, in isolation and pretend there is no history to it is intellectually and morally indefensible.
What is interesting perhaps is to ask how this will all be viewed in a century. People like using WW2 as an analogy for things on here a lot so here is another one. We now accept that, whilst the crimes of the Nazis were undeniably horrific and unjustified, Germany didn't just get to 1933 through chance or inevitability. They got there because the WW1 victors seriously mishandled and misjudged the post war settlement. They sought to punish Germany and make them pay for what they had done with no thought of the possible consequences. It is why we so often now refer to WW1 and WW2 as one long war.
And yet doing so in no way reduces or excuses the crimes of the Nazis. No one claims you are not allowed to say such things because it is defending Genocide.
Israel 'might' be about to make a serious mistake. We can all understand how they got here in the short term and also understand and accept the emotions and forces that drive them at present but if they follow the sort of route advocated by (for example and without criticism of him) Bart, and kill tens of thousands of civilians in the process then history will not judge them well for it. Just as it does not judge the US well for Iraq and Afghanistan.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/gop-rhetoric-hamas-00121051
Republicans are escalating their rhetoric to call for actions to “eliminate,” “eradicate” and “level” the Hamas militant group — no matter what it takes — as Washington plots more assistance to Israel in the wake of recent attacks.
“This is sick, and we have to treat sick people the way they deserve to be treated and eliminate them,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
“Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Tuesday night.
“Hamas must be eradicated & Israel must respond DISPROPORTIONATELY to this & to any futures attacks from any enemy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday...
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/peoplesenergy
https://www.ft.com/content/f0070f6d-2d5d-4bd9-9a91-1847be07588b
This is not capitalism as ever intended but insanity with spivs exploiting state guarantees of supply.
Bodycount is not a reliable metric. It is difficult to assess even if conducted carefully. But it usually isn't and it's also liable to overcounting. We keep doing this again and again and it never works. It's even bloody difficult to do a bodycount of your own side. People do not have little implanted life markers that show up as red dots on a screen that fade out when they die.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but virtually none of the UKs problems can be solved unless we get immigration down to trivial numbers*. It's immigration which drives the pressure on everything else, which then leads to pressure for more immigrants to do stuff, which leads to more pressure on everything else. It's a massive ponzi scheme, and the sooner we end it and take the resultant hit, the sooner we can get the UK on a stable long-term footing.
*all this fuss about asylum seekers/boat crossers etc is displacement activity. When we let in 10 people with visas for every one who comes on a small boat, the way to solve the problem starts with restrictions on visas, rather than implausible performance art about being nasty to the people who come by boat.
So higher energy prices results in greater energy efficiency or higher food prices leads you discover a cheaper brand for the same quality.
The rich might have a surplus of money that they are not prompted into such changes while the poor might not have scope for any further efficiencies.
So the changes often happen in the middle ranks with some furious, others delighted and others all emotions in between,
Yet it is Versailles which is deemed too harsh.
😶
It sounds unlikely. But I’ve never been. Seems I should amend that
Fifteen years after the end of WW2 West Germany - or at least its peoples - was in a far better place than it had been 15 years after WW1.
Germany lost territories in places where the population had no desire at all to be part of Germany. The Germans thought that was all very unfair, but we have no reason to agree with them. The reparations imposed upon Germany were lower (in terms of share of national income) than those they imposed upon France in 1871. And, they were constantly reduced.
Danzig and Memel were the only real legitimate grievances that the Germans had.
We are where we are. Try being a government in a democracy, arguing to their voters that they must accept punishment for their ancestors' actions.
Yes it might be a mistake, or it might be the right thing to do and resolve the situation.
More than half a century has passed of Palestinians living in land Israel won in its defensive war in 1967 without relocation or a peace settlement, and has it exactly worked out well? I think the one thing we can all agree it has not.
Ideally a peace settlement should have been reached. I think we can all agree with that. But its not on the cards. The Palestinians have rejected it time and again, and to be frank why the hell should Israel want to reach an accord when they're now led by people like Hamas who openly want to [and would] kill every Israeli from sea to sea now?
If there were an enemy threatening to murder every Englishman on the British Isles then I'd want them defeated, not reach an agreement with them.
The best thing to do might be to find the Palestinians a home of their own outside of Greater Israel and allow Israel the peace and security of a home of their own. Find them somewhere safe to live and prosper.
How many people look back at the forced relocation of Germans out of Eastern Europe [which was frankly deserved], or the Jews out of Arab nations [which was not] now from close to 80 years ago?
It was always going to send the country skint, and it has - we are paying for it now & people who cheered it on shouldn’t moan about it. How is it different to spending on the never never and not wanting to pay it back?
But I haven't looked - currently I'm quite happy with Octopus, and am considering their 1 year fix.
"The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it from every point of view except that of the economic future of the states whose destiny they were handling."
The problem with the last 13 years of planning policy is that the government don't want to tackle difficult decisions about where growth goes, they just keep avoiding it - palming it off to someone else, local authorities, civil servants etc... the Labour party seem to be making the right noises , but lets see.
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
I had read about Westerners defending Stalin's purges and collectivization campaigns and thought, well, their ideological fervor was probably just amplified by the difficulty of getting good information out of the USSR.
But now I see that's not it.
Then, as now, there was plenty of information to understand what was really going on. It's just that the ideology IS about this, it IS that ends justify the means. It's how we got the Red Terror, the Great Terror and this—Western leftists cheering all the while.
And, if Soviet history is any guide, the only thing that made these can't-make-an-omelet folks reconsider whether that was really true—or if the end was worth it if these were the means—was finding themselves in an NKVD cell and thinking, "There's been a terrible mistake."
By then, of course, it was too late.
If this is the kind of revolution you support, just know: the revolution always eats its young. Always.
Allow Germany to keep Alsace-Lorraine or Polish inhabited territory in the east ?
Both ridiculous and wrong.
The reparations weren't paid and the military restrictions were evaded.
The likelihood is that Germany was always going to come for a rematch when the strategic situation suited it.
Absent that, would Versailles have had the same effect ?
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2022/10/04/scorched-earth-using-nasa-fire-data-to-monitor-war-zones/
But to switch from our current system where politicians and neighbours and assorted NIMBYs get a say in blocking development, to one where they don't, would have radical consequences.
It would end the oligopoly of developers that can play the system to acquire and sit on consent (especially but not only if done in conjunction with a switch to LVT).
It would allow more variety in what is built, rather than what is
It would allow adaptability as if higher density housing for example were desired people could bulldoze low density housing and rebuild to higher density, without having to get their neighbours or Councillors to approve.
It would mean politicians would no longer have to appeal or pander to NIMBYs as codes being set nationally and zoning being approved locally means they have no more input after its zoned.
As a leftist I can also say, honestly, that the British Empire was bad. That imperialism in all forms in bad. The roughly 100 million killed in the 40 years between 1881 and 1920 by the British Empire, was bad.
I will never be treated as if I sincerely believe the first one if I ever make a comment about how the industrialisation of the USSR from serfdom under the Tsar to beating the Nazi war machine under Stalin was still pretty impressive, as was the increase in literacy and numeracy rates and the relative decline in poverty. Whereas people will legitimately defend the second statement by saying "well, we gave them the railways and democracy, so it was fine".
The joy of freedom and choice is that everyone gets what they want that way. Want to move to a suburban sprawl, move there. Want to move to a compact city, move there. Want to live in a compact town, move there.
Horses for courses, variety is the spice of life, let everyone choose.
As Rochdale says [thank you for that], I'm all in favour of building public transport too. I'm not saying every town should be suburbia, I'm saying build all sorts of options - rails, motorways, trams, roads, cycle paths and let people choose where they want to live.
If we end the housing crisis and build millions more homes (we should be aiming for a million homes a year to be constructed in my view over the next decade to partially close our housing shortage and cope with population growth) then there will be options for people to choose a setting they prefer, rather than being dumped in the only thing they've got with no hope of deciding for themselves.
Israel has made many mistakes over the years. Netanyahu is unquestionably the wrong leader for it, especially at such a time. I fear that an invasion of Gaza now will be a strategic error and lead to all sorts of casualties for the innocent.
But the Palestinians have consistently made huge errors, the biggest one of all being their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas seeks the elimination of Israel and the killing of every Jew everywhere - not just in Israel. This is explicitly genocidal. There is no negotiation with such a movement. Eliminating it is the only answer. Just as we sought to eliminate Nazism and ISIS and other similar genocidal movements.
Those who worry about what happens next need to provide an alternative to Israel, one that will not make that country prey to genocidal maniacs. Lots of people are willing to speak hard truths to Israel about obeying the laws of war and civilian deaths and the rest of it. Very few are telling Hamas that it is their genocidal ideology which has brought Gaza to the point it is, that it is their deliberate policy of hiding amongst civilians which is putting Palestinians at risk, it is their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist which means there is not the remotest hope of starting any peace talks.
There is plenty of pressure which needs putting on Israel but Hamas must first be eliminated. It cannot - until it changes what it wants - be a player. It has taken itself outside the universe of civilised decency. So if invasion of Gaza is not the solution, what is? And if we don't have an alternative solution, then we can hardly be surprised if Israel does what it thinks necessary to save itself. What would we do were we in their position?
I sometimes feel that commentators are unwilling to provide or even begin to think about what an alternative might be because - after all the condemnations of Hamas - they give up at expecting anything better from the Palestinians and it is, after all, so much easier and more comfortable to revert to criticising Israel.
And at that price actually putting solar panels on the house makes no sense at all...
Westminster voting intention:
LAB: 46% (-)
CON: 30% (+3)
LDEM: 10% (-1)
REF: 5% (-)
GRN: 3% (-1)
via @Savanta_UK, 06 - 08 Oct
https://x.com/britainelects/status/1712397222891999698?s=46
Pre Liverpool, but does imply some sort of bounce for the Tories after their stunningly successful and closely orchestrated conference.
Reversing out of a parking space in a car park, slowly and taking care as always, a car suddenly drove into me causing a tiny blemish to his bumper and no damage to my rental. He insisted on calling the police because I wouldn't cough up the 100 dollars he was demanding in cash. I think it was a scam.
The 100 million deaths seems to be attributed to India alone. Using similar methodologies as to how the USSR count is come to (although some estimates of the USSR death count includes the numbers of Nazi soldiers they killed - which I do not think is reasonable to add).
Yes if you want to get from Warrington Town Centre to Manchester City Centre then the train is absolutely fantastic. I've used it myself I'll have you know, when I went to Manchester Christmas Market and wanted to drink so wouldn't drive.
But if you want to go either from or to other places then buses can be better. Want to get from your home, not town centre, to the Trafford Centre for instance? Buses can work very well for that too. There's options and choice either way. Of course cars are far better, but I've met people there before for days out who took a bus rather than drive.
Plus as Rochdale said I'm in favour of building public transport as well as motorways. Indeed I can't see any reason why we couldn't with investment have a Northwest tram network that operates all the way from Liverpool to Manchester and covering all the towns in-between.
The only fanatics here are those who oppose any investment in roads just because they despise roads and cars. I'm not opposing investment in public transport, even though I don't use it.
Now the country is skint on the back of shutting it down, paying people not to work etc, and the same people who demanded it are asking where the money for public services is!
"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed but in every case it is someone else's blood . That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything."
I'm sure your post won't get many likes and anyone who agrees with you should look carefully at their own posting history to see how they responded at the time.
I keep banging on about it (this is, after all, PB) but only @contrarian consistently stated what a calamity lockdown was and would be and boy was he right.
We should have done an Iceland. Buyer beware, if you invest in something your investment can go down (or be wiped out) as well as up.
The code system works and it doesn't. On the other hand a relative built an entire housing estate on his farm over the course of about 5 years through a code based system selling the plots off individually. But the latter happened not just because of the code system, also because there is unlimited land in Finland to build on and a low population density and no opposition, also because the Finns keep on top of building new infrastructure, unlike the UK. They've also made mistakes in Finland with too liberal code based systems on similar estates, there are estates where opportunistic developers have crammed in too many single storey houses with no space/gardens, it is the cheapest, poor quality type of development, something must have gone wrong with the plot/space ratios. In our relatives case he thinks it worked better because he employed a landscape architect to design the layout, but that was his choice (and expense)
If the demand isn't there? That's their choice.
Of course building more roads allows more routes buses can take.
If there's any infrastructure that's missing that prevents buses from operating, eg like roads, then of course that should be invested in. If all the infrastructure is there but the buses aren't operating anyway because of a lack of demand, then that's no different to cars not driving because of a lack of demand.
This is the man man would now have as PM? Colour me unconvinced...
But all I have is hazy youthful impressions - I never actually lived there.
Lots of places did not have borders in the way we conceive of them in the modern sense, and if they did they were much more permeable, compared to what we have now.
Absolutely agreed that low density is better, hence the parallel conversation about transport. Some people prefer high density though, so if they do then there should be freedom to do that too.
Of course if we have enough houses able to be built, and a liberal zone/code based system then situations where some developments are badly designed while others are well designed, may mean that the well designed developments are sold and lived in while the badly designed ones may end up vacant and be a burden on the owner who badly designed them as nobody is forced to buy or let them given better alternatives and the stupid owner who screwed up needs to continue paying all taxes on the land himself rather than getting an income from those who have no better alternative.
I thought she was supposed to be the vaguely sane one.
Maybe they can afford a better alternative, like driving, so aren't forced to go on the bus due to a lack of a superior alternative? Who knows?
So long as options are available, that's all that matters. If people choose not to take a certain option, that's their choice.
Apart from school buses which are jam packed, almost all buses I see are nearly-empty. When I went on one recently there wasn't a single passenger on the bus when I got on, and when I got off there was only one other passenger on board. That may be why fewer are operating perhaps?
Will be interested if SKS's speech or his subsequent stance on green lighting slaughter in Gaza has any impact on VI.
Suspect both will be popular with his target voter.
But now, today, when I look at Gaza I think “that’s sad and awful. But… they want to kill every Jew they find.”
And there it ends
Lab 46 (+0)
Con 30 (+3)
Only up to 8.10.23 so before SKS speech
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india
In similar vein, a large majority of the total comes from guesses and assumptions.
Their "choice" has been restricted. For some people, their freedom to travel further than they can walk has been eliminated almost entirely.
That's why accessibility is such an important part of indexes if multiple deprivation. The young, the old and the poor.
I fully get that the residents of Gaza have a terrible life, that they are economically repressed by Israel and made to beg for water and electricity. Israel’s policies have been unenlightened at best and self harming all too often. If I lived in Gaza I would hate the Israeli government and want to resist that oppression.
But if you want to be listened to, if you want things to change, you do not start with the beheading of babies because they are Jews.
The most stupid people in the UK are drivers who oppose bus lanes.
100 million in those forty years is a wild exaggeration, but might be close to the total numbers that died during famines under British rule in India from the C18th to the C20th. That forty year period doesn’t even include the “Great Famine” of 1876/1878 when 8million people are believed to have died.
Obviously a counter to that is that the region suffered famines long before British rule, but even a cursory reading of history reveals that famines under earlier British rule seem to have been much worse, often exacerbated by Imperial policies & taxes. Rather like the famine in Ireland in the C19th, British rulers seem to have cared little for the people they were notionally in charge of & were more interested in tax income than they were in saving lives.