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Replacing the irreplaceable – politicalbetting.com
Replacing the irreplaceable – politicalbetting.com
Who will be the next Welsh First Minister?Vaughan Gething opens up as 8/13 favouritehttps://t.co/xEr6J9tKhM pic.twitter.com/sTgx7mlK9n
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Basically, the Scottish government's policy of universal benefits buying popularity has run out of road. Significant cuts are now inevitable as, sadly, are more tax increases. Getting consultants, for example, to come to Scotland is going to be challenging.
You can get a one way flight to Reykjavik for £40. EasyJet. Just sayin’ - if you like volcanoes
Our new Finance Secretary states that the reduction of the State must be done in "an orderly way". In my own area we have been running more courts than ever before trying to catch up the backlog caused by Covid and the overwhelming number of sexual offences being prosecuted under current policies. It is going to be genuinely difficult to make choices today and the frankly daft priorities of the First Minister have made things worse.
It's not that there are lots of Welsh speakers, it's just that their votes matter in rather a lot of marginal areas - Carmarthenshire, southern Powys, the western Valleys, and the north-west around Bangor and Mon.
Sometimes I'm glad to be living in the boring old Cotswolds.
(Save for the immediate vicinity.)
(And it's being bought for nothing - the 500m is a capital injection.)
Farfetch -- which was valued at $20 billion+ at its peak in 2020 -- will be acquired by Coupang, South Korea's answer to Amazon, for $500 million.
https://twitter.com/LizziePaton/status/1736753644526002612#
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-china-67757407
Official casualty figure is around 100-200, so that probably means around 50,000 dead and several million homeless in -15C.
Is it a difficult language? I already know how to pronounce Llanelli.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67754983
I would have said it isn't terribly difficult to speak or read, as long as you don't get sidetracked by trying to learn to write it, as different rules then apply and it becomes more complicated.
The grammar structures are unusual and not very consistent, but in spoken Welsh that matters rather less.
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2023/12/farfetch-sold-coupang/
...⟨k⟩ was in common use until the 16th century, but was dropped at the time of the publication of the New Testament in Welsh, as William Salesbury explained: "⟨c⟩ for ⟨k⟩, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth". This change was not popular at the time..
You probably don't want to be downwind.
He has never used it and now regards the whole thing as a total crazy waste of time, tho he did enjoy the coastal scenery
I’d love to see a proper lava flow volcano someday. And an explosive eruption, ideally at the very moment it begins to erupt, and from a safe distance.
Presumably he subsequently decided there was something he ought to have done instead ?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-67740978
This far they haven't, for example, cancelled any flights. The atmosphere effects appear to be limited - which is what counts for the rest of us.
Column. On the Tory moderates who are apparently*beginning* to worry that their party might *get* a bit extreme *after* the next election.
https://twitter.com/hugorifkind/status/1737016196061434041
Rishi Sunak is meeting just one of the five priorities he set out at the start of the year, according to BBC analysis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67752738
Now, at Leon's request, lesson 2 of successful project management: Make sure all the targets you publish are slam-dunk gimmes.
Although the chap who bought it didn’t speak Welsh, and never learned it! He seemed to make a success of it too.
El Niño typically brings floods in East Africa, Peru and California.
A sane party would not have a Rwanda policy in the first place. Away from the hype and the fight, there’s barely a cigarette paper’s difference between the version wanted by the rebels, which is harebrained and unworkable, and the version proposed by Sunak, which is also harebrained and unworkable. It is a function of cringing deference to nonsense that the policy even exists, let alone that they basically all ended up voting for it.
Today, the Conservatives are scary. I don’t just mean in a Liz Truss way, like an unexpected midnight clown at the end of your bed. I mean that they feel flighty, erratic, unmoderated, prone to alarming lurches. With Brexit, after so many years of fights and votes and stasis, I can understand why even some moderate MPs just sighed and waved it through. But Rwanda? They all knew it was nonsense, from the PM who proposed it, to the home secretary who advanced it, to the supposed moderates themselves, and they all voted for it anyway.
Suppose the Conservative ecosystem decides it wants to move back towards centrism. Not whether they will or should, but just to suppose.
Who is their Starmer figure who can lead that trudge? Penny Mordaunt? Simultaneously far too woke to be acceptable and nowhere near centrist enough.
Growing up I was never comfortable enough to try speaking it, but had a large enough vocab which could be combined with a reasonable ability to read body language and tone to understand fairly well what was going on - I survived 6th form in a very Welsh school; I was the only pupil who wasn't bilingual in the whole school.
My younger sister learnt aged about 9-10 and is very fluent, she is now a fairly senior grade in the Welsh civil service (amusingly, we have a fairly English surname, but she married an English bloke with a stereotypically Welsh surname, which makes everyone assume she's actually Welsh).
For the right, Rwanda is a perfect example, JRM's 'bring back imperial' and Braverman's 'steal the tents' were others. On the left examples include the complete f*ck-up on gender and trans and the fact that mere concern for Gaza civilians is not enough, you've got to hate Israel.
We must guard against the extremes on both sides.
UK economy at risk of ‘hard landing’, warns bond giant Pimco
https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/dec/19/uk-economy-at-risk-of-hard-landing-warning-ftse-pound-eurozone-inflation-pimco
https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1736780959268155815
That's simply not true.
I'm pretty sure there will be a few who see it as a direct favour to Putin.
(Theory: the public understand that falling inflation doesn't mean prices are falling well enough - middle class condescension notwithstanding.)
Better to be French or British rather than German or Italian in these hard times. British due to wage increases; I think the French figure is due to lower energy inflation (nuclear power).
Mind you, almost everyone in the USA also seems not to be able to do anything else other than spend like a drunken sailor too judging by the Dave Ramsey phone ins.
“BREAKING: Video from a contact on the ground in Eagle Pass, TX right now shows a mass of thousands of migrants waiting to be processed by Border Patrol after they crossed illegally today. I’ve spent hundreds of days there over the last 2+ years and I’ve never seen it like this.”
https://x.com/billmelugin_/status/1736928008433537100?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67494082
This is pretty mad.
It's currently costing over half a billion a year because the grid doesn't have sufficient capacity to transmit power from the north to the south of the UK. That's likely to quadruple over the next decade.
A 2GW HVDC line between (as an example) London and Aberdeen would cost approx £1-2bn.
It's not difficult.
They would rather Trump wins than have any form of border control.
https://www.business-live.co.uk/manufacturing/harland-wolff-headcount-hits-1000-28296206
https://utilityweek.co.uk/england-scotland-electricity-superhighway-gets-go-ahead/
Should have been done before, I agree.
The legal fees and opportunity cost of the public inquiry will cost approx £10-20bn
However, the truth here, in case you have not been paying attention, If the economy grows at 0.00001 and 0.000001 is shaved off borrowing, Sunak can tell Mr Speaker he has grown the economy and got borrowing down, at every PMQs. And he is.
Big expensive bridges and railways are what excites them.
I wonder what they'll build first, HS2 linking Leeds to London, or the network capability to transmit more power from the north to the south. Hmm.
...Last year Ofgem approved four projects to help ease transmission issues, including an undersea cable between Peterhead in Aberdeenshire and Drax in Yorkshire.
But Carbon Tracker warned wind generation capacity in Scotland was set to be four times greater by 2030, but cabling would only double in that time, under current plans...
Maureen Sweeney, Irish postmistress who reported the 1944 storm that delayed D-Day – obituary
She did not know the data she sent from Europe’s most westerly weather station went straight to the Allies – even though Ireland was neutral
Maureen Sweeney, who has died aged 100, was a postmistress on the west coast of Ireland who supplied the weather reports of a storm in the Atlantic that persuaded Eisenhower to delay D-Day by 24 hours.
The Blacksod lighthouse-cum-post office, on the wind-battered Mullet peninsula in County Mayo, was Europe’s most westerly weather observation station. Every hour, day and night, reports had to be collected on barometric pressure, wind speed, temperature, precipitation, water vapour and other variables, using rudimentary instruments, by the assistant postmistress Maureen Flavin (as she then was); her future husband, Ted Sweeney, the lighthousekeeper; his mother, the postmistress; and his sister. Their reports were then transmitted over crackling telephone line to Ballina, Co Mayo, then to the Irish Meteorological Service in Dublin.
What they did not know was that, although Ireland was ostensibly neutral, the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, was sharing weather intelligence with the Allies, but not the Nazis. (With a similar sleight of hand, the Irish government had ordered huge stone signs saying “Éire” to be erected on the Irish coastline to ward off belligerent aircraft; each sign had a special number, which in fact made them invaluable for navigation, but these numbers were only supplied to the Allies.)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/12/18/maureen-sweeney-irish-post-d-day-overlord-eisenhower/
The reality is that our economy has been surviving on negative real interest rates since 2009 and we finally have a real return on capital, albeit an historically modest one. That will undoubtedly hurt those who have been dependent on cheap money but it will also keep the downward pressure on inflation.
There is, of course, a risk that the Bank will be too slow in bringing interest rates down, just as it was too slow in putting them up. Sterling is also quite strong at the moment which should also reduce inflationary pressures on imported goods as well. The Bank is waiting to see if inflation continues to fall sharply. As are we all.
While this is a recurring moan this does not cause the sort of political firestorm that overturns nations and causes governments to rethink or fall.
But the reality with teeth in the UK is so far removed from the 'NHS, universal, free at the point of delivery and based on need' is so far from Attlee's NHS that it is unrecognisable.
If they said 'Having a baby is a lifestyle choice, so if you want medical care you go private and if you can't afford it you phone a friend' the government would fall in five minutes. Odd
Let's face it, the current government just isn't sufficiently interested in infrastructure at all.
I think that both the UK and much of the EU is suffering from debt exhaustion. We have debt piled up everywhere, whether in the public sector or in businesses and, as interest rates become higher in real terms, this is a drag on future growth. We have been living on our seed corn for too long and people are wondering where the next harvest is going to come from.
I don't expect any falls in bank rate maybe 0.25% until the Bank is satisfied that we really are on track/approaching the 2% CPI.
So they are attracted to things which claim to be 'the biggest ever' or 'world beating' and such things inevitably tend to be expensive and/or difficult to implement.
This focus on the 'big and expensive' is also encouraged by the myriad of organisations who benefit from them.
1) The 2016 referendum was lost because of laziness, folly and a terrible campaign from the centre
2) Post referendum a cross party centrist consensus of those who wanted remain failed to agree a 'Norway for Now' proposal, or similar, which would have honoured Brexit and got most of what they wanted.
As a result the Tory party has for now abolished itself for its traditional centrist base, and Labour have to implement a Brexit policy they are all opposed to. Because they faffed about with Ref2, and leadership from the friend of Hamas they too have inflicted huge damage on themselves and us.
A figure worth noting. Tory support in polling is sometimes running at 22%. This is half of the 2019 election figure of 44%. They have lost 50% of their base.
BTW social care, delays now decades old, is showing the same symptoms - moans but its not red hot. Labour never mention it...
But it could well have an effect on recruiting the future workforce.