Better than trolling - it's a delightful piece of mischief making.
Only problem is that it might genuinely tempt him, and it's not utterly impossible that Nick's fanciful projections actually come about.
What a surreal thread. It’s like PB having a fantasy dream sequence dropped in .
Rather than a merger, in Nick’s fantasy more likely a deathmatch?
But what happens to Farage? Does he join the Tories and become their leader? What would polls show with Con leader farage, and Ref leader Boris? It would be like a reversed engineered 1980s.
Are we really destined to 18 years of Labour government with all those non entities they have as MPs 😖
No, Corbyn takes over the Tories.
I was referring to how Lab and SDP battled for so many of same voters, whilst Tories split their sides laughing at this happening in a FPTP system.
Con and Ref getting 40% or more between them, but not merging but fighting each other with 20% each would make very few seats for more than 40% of the vote. All those Labour politicians in government no use to the country and more solid than boredom would be shitting their legs off with laughter election after election.
Nick P’s Fantasy Sequence this country does not need at all!
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
7/10 for at least the effort.
And it’s not entirely untrue.
But he has no strategy or foresight. The marbles episode was foolish. Cancelling HS2 up north (and then having your party in London campaigning that potholes were being mended with the savings) was foolish. This whole Rwanda nonsense is foolish.
And he should have understood that his USP, after three PMs increasingly inadequate in their different ways, was being the sensible, moderate, practical guy who would restore us to sensible politics. That was his mission, but he buckled at the first hurdle and is now doing all this nutty stuff, trashing his own brand.
Rishi appears to have no feeling for politics. Anyone who'd had a marginal seat and grafted for every vote would just KNOW that some of these ideas would play very badly. Worse, he seems to be surrounded by people who don't tell him these ideas will play very badly.
He needs a brutal street-fighter to put him right. They seem very few and far between in the modern Conservative Party.
Labour MP Tahir Ali accused the PM of having blood on his hands over refusing to back a ceasefire
Labour say this was inappropriate language.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they, because if the PM has blood on his hands so does SKS
What do you make of Hamas rejecting a ceasefire.
A two month ceasefire at that.
In return for the release of the 130 hostages still held, who seem to have been forgotten. They include a 1 year old baby, his 4 year old brother and their mother. Hamas has bluntly refused this.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
7/10 for at least the effort.
And it’s not entirely untrue.
But he has no strategy or foresight. The marbles episode was foolish. Cancelling HS2 up north (and then having your party in London campaigning that potholes were being mended with the savings) was foolish. This whole Rwanda nonsense is foolish.
And he should have understood that his USP, after three PMs increasingly inadequate in their different ways, was being the sensible, moderate, practical guy who would restore us to sensible politics. That was his mission, but he buckled at the first hurdle and is now doing all this nutty stuff, trashing his own brand.
He’s made errors of course. I’m not claiming he’s a great prime monster - he clearly isn’t. I am merely saying he is a decent middling PM who just happens to be in power when times are as tough as most of us can remember - literally war and plague are stalking the globe
And he has inherited an awful lot of shite policies from prior PMs of all stripes. Migration is a massive issue - but not of his doing. Post Covid health issues are also huge - not his fault
Anyway he’ll be gone this year. And then we will have Starmer’s boring nasal tones explaining why nothing is getting especially better, and he’ll be doing it with extra loads of Wokeness
He will be unpopular after a year and likely loathed after two or three
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
They probably learned the wrong lessons from the privatisation of BT.
Who cares how tall Clarkey and Rishy are? Both are 100% helmet and that is the only measurement that matters
I have no idea why race, religion etc are protected characteristics, but people think it’s fine to mock someone over their height. You get the hand you get.
Making religion a protected characteristic was a terrible mistake.
People choose their beliefs.
No it wasn't, ask the survivors of the Holocaust for starters what happened when their religious freedom to be Jewish was not respected by the State
The Nazis killed non practicing, atheist and converted Jews enthusiastically. They viewed Jews as an ethnic group, rather than primarily a religion.
Judaism is a religion however, not a nationality (even in Israel) or a race
"Races" don't exist. They are thus nothing or anything, whatever people call them. UK law says you can be racist against Jews (and Sikhs), so in that sense they are a race. One could describe the Jewish people as an ethnoreligious group, like Sikhs, Druze, Yazidis etc. There is no agreed, overarching rule for who is or is not Jewish from a religious perspective, as there isn't for any religion.
Jews are generally considered racially white
Jews have always been considered a people (an ethic group if you prefer) by themselves and others. You betray a profound and worrying ignorance by confusing the Jewish People with Judaism as a religion.
Judaism is a religion, even more concerning is your ludicrous left liberal assertion that the descendants of the followers of Moses do not belong to a religion!
Can I have an apology from @HYUFD for this ridiculous assertion? Of course Judaism is a religion. All its followers are Jews, but not all Jews follow Judaism. I am tired of this man. I pointed out at many points that Judaism is a religion but the Jews are a people. This is utterly wrong.
No you most certainly can't. If it wasn't for the religion of Judaism based on the teachings of Abraham and Moses for starters, Jews would not exist.
The fact some of the original Jews descendants might now be secular doesn't change that.
But you complained that our seal said that "the descendants of the followers of Moses do not belong to a religion".
You've just admitted that, up front. Some don't, in your own freely expressed words. Therefore the descendants of Jews at time = t can't all belong to the Jewish religion just because of their birth and ancestry.
The vast majority do, even if they aren't all Orthodox. If it was not for the Jewish religion of their ancestors, as set down in the Torah, none of them would have Jewish identity at all.
Of course therefore the religious must be protected from discrimination as much as any other protected characteristic, as was the original argument I was making
But that's not germane to what you were saying. You were making a factual untruth. Claiming A meant B when it doesn't.
This is PB, not some other websites we can think of.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
The latest "strategy" was the Williams Shapps Plan in May 2021.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
They probably learned the wrong lessons from the privatisation of BT.
In that phase of the Thatcherite zeal they were obsessed with competition. Which is a Good Thing where it can be brought. But where there is an infrastructure monopoly? A handful of rail journeys have competition, the vast majority are single operator and always will be. So we were given a structure to allow competition that couldn't happen.
Had Major got his way then we would have had (as an example) LNER. With EU competition rules applied to allow open access competition such as Hull Trains, Grand Central and lumo. Exactly like now at a fraction of the bloody cost.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Twas ever thus. Have you read Fiennes' I Tried To Run A Railway? He was eloquent on the waste and incompetence of such reorganisations.
I have - in fact there's a copy on the shelf behind me! Fantastic book. It's a bit "Why I Was Right And Everyone Else Was Wrong, Vol. 37" but, to be honest, 50 years later he has been proved right on so much.
Perhaps the biggest shame of that era is that his schemes to cut costs on branch lines - the East Anglian Paytrains and so on - weren't adopted more widely. Instead Beeching just cut the lot.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
Wasn't the franchising model based on EU requirements that track and TOCs be separate companies? Obviously it's not universally the case on the continent that track and TOCs are separate companies, but it wouldn't be the first time the UK interpreted EU rules in a way not necessarily to the advantage of the UK.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
Wasn't the franchising model based on EU requirements that track and TOCs be separate companies? Obviously it's not universally the case on the continent that track and TOCs are separate companies, but it wouldn't be the first time the UK interpreted EU rules in a way not necessarily to the advantage of the UK.
Nope. That EU directive was more than a decade off in the future. And had that happened then simply split operations and infrastructure within the same group as the French do.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
He is very much like Will from the Inbetweeners. Cannot not hear it. A bit of Blair, but not enough.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
I'm not sure a purely reconstituted Big Four would have been great. Two of them were far too big and chaotically run.
You could maybe have had six or seven companies, most notably putting Scotrail in as an independent company and possibly still keeping Chiltern separate.
But frankly, almost anything would have been better than what transpired.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
Way off topic - Seattle Times ($) - Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.
That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.
Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.
“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.” . . .
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.” . . .
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB. . . .
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website. . . .
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
The latest "strategy" was the Williams Shapps Plan in May 2021.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
That wasn't a strategy anyway. The irony was that nothing they proposed in the IRP could be delivered, unless they built new tracks, because the ones they proposed to use were either full or unsuitable. So to deliver the IRP, they would have needed *checks notes* HS2.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
I'm not sure a purely reconstituted Big Four would have been great. Two of them were far too big and chaotically run.
You could maybe have had six or seven companies, most notably putting Scotrail in as an independent company and possibly still keeping Chiltern separate.
But frankly, almost anything would have been better than what transpired.
Why keep Chiltern separate? Because it was well planned and managed? In a Big 4 world we wouldn't have had the influx of bus company clowns not understanding how train driving is different to bus driving.
Like you I can think of a whole stack of reasons why not to recreate the Big 4. But we're part way there with the current gWr franchise and integrating intercity and local services has been hugely better than having them separate.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I thought the idea of the boomers was to volunteer *the young*, not themselves?
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Are you saying Truss had the least annoying voice? Surely not. It’s corporate berating at its most corporate and beraty. And Thatcher’s was annoying but not that bad.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
I can usually buy an Advance for my trips to/from the office for £2. This works out at 14.7p/mile.
Cheaper than petrol.
No parking costs.
I can read on the journey.
And much quicker. (Except this morning due to storm-related faff.)
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I am up for this as they conscript me as a Field Marshal.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
I'm not sure a purely reconstituted Big Four would have been great. Two of them were far too big and chaotically run.
You could maybe have had six or seven companies, most notably putting Scotrail in as an independent company and possibly still keeping Chiltern separate.
But frankly, almost anything would have been better than what transpired.
Why keep Chiltern separate? Because it was well planned and managed? In a Big 4 world we wouldn't have had the influx of bus company clowns not understanding how train driving is different to bus driving.
Like you I can think of a whole stack of reasons why not to recreate the Big 4. But we're part way there with the current gWr franchise and integrating intercity and local services has been hugely better than having them separate.
I was thinking more because it forms a compact and coherent unit that doesn't overlap much with any other operator.
As for bus companies, I'm not so sure. Do you know how many bus companies prior to 1948 were either wholly or partly railway owned? Starting with the largest, Midland Red.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I thought the idea of the boomers was to volunteer *the young*, not themselves?
Well that's the point. " I want to sign up, oh damn, what do you mean I am too old? I did my duty, I volunteered, what about all these youngsters?"
Way off topic - Seattle Times ($) - Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.
That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.
Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.
“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.” . . .
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.” . . .
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB. . . .
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website. . . .
Yup - posted the original Leeham News comments earlier. All the journalists showed up in the comments to offer the whistleblower a writeup. Looks like it turned out to be genuine.
Boeing are in deep shit on this one. Alaska Airlines will be asking for sagans of money to make up for their losses, for a start.
It’s blowing a hoolie in Hamburg where I’m waiting for a flight. I just saw my incoming BA flight land - one of the advantages of an otherwise mediocre lounge is a nice runway view - and it was doing that side to side wobble thing where you wonder if the wing tip will touch the runway. Forget helicopter tours of the Grand Canyon, this is mildly disconcerting.
Tip in mediocre German airport lounges: the best of a bad bunch of drinks is usually weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc, typically mass produced in Pfalz) which every lounge in the nation seems to stock. Better than the fizzy beer.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
The latest "strategy" was the Williams Shapps Plan in May 2021.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
That wasn't a strategy anyway. The irony was that nothing they proposed in the IRP could be delivered, unless they built new tracks, because the ones they proposed to use were either full or unsuitable. So to deliver the IRP, they would have needed *checks notes* HS2.
Yes. What nobody anywhere near government wants to talk about is that scrapping HS2 absolutely stuffs the network. As in "how the hell do we accommodate HS2 services north of Handsacre" stuffed. They genuinely don't know - projections are put there showing LESS capacity on the northern WCML once HS2 opens as they accommodate these new services.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Are you saying Truss had the least annoying voice? Surely not. It’s corporate berating at its most corporate and beraty. And Thatcher’s was annoying but not that bad.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
Yes. Liz Truss's voice = oddly not-annoying. To me, anyway. It is, I concede, a highly subjective measure.
Starmer's voice is also annoying but not as annoying as Rishi's.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
Wasn't the franchising model based on EU requirements that track and TOCs be separate companies? Obviously it's not universally the case on the continent that track and TOCs are separate companies, but it wouldn't be the first time the UK interpreted EU rules in a way not necessarily to the advantage of the UK.
As we are no longer in the EU there is no reason to continue with that model.
In order to improve the railways, we need to do the following. 1. Allocate a sum of money, after which the Treasury have no further involvement. 2. Ignore the necessity of showing results before the next election. 3. Allow practical engineers to design, install, maintain and operate the railways. 4. Avoid, wherever possible, the use of consultants. 5. Have one integrated national rail system, with proper integration with buses, ferries, etc. 6. Ignore NIMBYs when planning infrastructure improvements. Simplify and speed up planning applications. Don’t let newts and shrews prevent necessary improvements. 7. Infrastructure structure improvements to be designed to increase capacity, remove bottlenecks and allow for separation of trains running at different speeds. Fast and slow four track running lines, which would also allow trains to swap tracks in an emergency, would provide more flexibility than building brand new lines. 8. Reduce and simplify fares to attract custom. 9. Run longer trains when needed, rather than overcrowded four carriage Cross Country slums on wheels. 10. Don’t gold plate everything, New stations shouldn’t cost £2 million.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Are you saying Truss had the least annoying voice? Surely not. It’s corporate berating at its most corporate and beraty. And Thatcher’s was annoying but not that bad.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
Yes. Liz Truss's voice = oddly not-annoying. To me, anyway. It is, I concede, a highly subjective measure.
Starmer's voice is also annoying but not as annoying as Rishi's.
Starmer is in the Major category. A nasal quality, but not affected just naturally the way he talks.
Close your eyes and Rishi sounds quite like Blair.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
I love this list on what I think is a underrated topic. I think my own list might be:
1 Thatcher (surely top of everyone's list, love her or hate her, that voice is just awful) 2 Sunak (I'm surprised more people didn't immediately notice how annoying he sounds) 3 Johnson (I just think the way he speaks is ridiculous) 4 Cameron (sadist public school prefect) 5 Blair (eager head boy trying and largely failing to sound less posh than he is) 6 May (slightly hectoring tone, like someone objecting to you parking too close to her driveway in a prosperous Surrey village) 7 Truss (perfectly normal voice despite her being batshit crazy) 8 Major (quite lovely tones despite a few weird intonations) 9 Brown (pleasing middle class Scots burr)
The last three I could put in broadly equal place I think, I don't find their voices grating in the least. Overall, we seem to like PMs with annoying voices, or at least elect a lot of them.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
Illuminating. Thankyou
The tragicomedy is that Major proposed breaking BR up into the Big 4 companies that were merged together to form BR. Much in the way the Japanese system works you would have had a regional company responsible for infrastructure and operations.
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
I'm not sure a purely reconstituted Big Four would have been great. Two of them were far too big and chaotically run.
You could maybe have had six or seven companies, most notably putting Scotrail in as an independent company and possibly still keeping Chiltern separate.
But frankly, almost anything would have been better than what transpired.
Why keep Chiltern separate? Because it was well planned and managed? In a Big 4 world we wouldn't have had the influx of bus company clowns not understanding how train driving is different to bus driving.
Like you I can think of a whole stack of reasons why not to recreate the Big 4. But we're part way there with the current gWr franchise and integrating intercity and local services has been hugely better than having them separate.
Though a chunk of that was deliberate; the train operators were designed to be very capital light. Track run by someone else, trains leased from someone else. Not much more than a logo and a bunch of contracts.
Make it easy for lots of clowns to bid, because competition between clowns ensures you get the best clowns.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
You can often save a lot of money by splitting tickets, but it's a bit of a faff to do so.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Are you saying Truss had the least annoying voice? Surely not. It’s corporate berating at its most corporate and beraty. And Thatcher’s was annoying but not that bad.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
I'm with Cookie on this, Truss has a bizarrely unannoying voice.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I am up for this as they conscript me as a Field Marshal.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
You can often save a lot of money by splitting tickets, but it's a bit of a faff to do so.
I find Trainline is pretty good at splitting the tickets and getting you a cheaper fare.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
The latest "strategy" was the Williams Shapps Plan in May 2021.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
That wasn't a strategy anyway. The irony was that nothing they proposed in the IRP could be delivered, unless they built new tracks, because the ones they proposed to use were either full or unsuitable. So to deliver the IRP, they would have needed *checks notes* HS2.
Yes. What nobody anywhere near government wants to talk about is that scrapping HS2 absolutely stuffs the network. As in "how the hell do we accommodate HS2 services north of Handsacre" stuffed. They genuinely don't know - projections are put there showing LESS capacity on the northern WCML once HS2 opens as they accommodate these new services.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Labyrinthine industry structures thanks to privatisation; insane engineering and consultancy prices; absolutely no sense of direction.
Example: 15 years ago or so, the Government decided to move towards electrification (which pretty much everywhere else in Europe has been doing for ages). So they started electrifying a load of lines and ordered a load of electric trains.
The electrification cost more and took longer than expected (like I say, insane prices) so the Government abandoned it halfway. The Oxford electrification only got as far as Didcot. The Bristol electrification only got as far as Chippenham. And so on.
But they'd already ordered the trains. So we now have fleets of electric trains sitting around and nowhere to run them. (@Sunil_Prasannan can tell you the numbers.) One bunch of electric intercity trains had to be expensively fitted with diesel engines. Another set of comfortable 1990s electric trains - not that old in railway terms - got carted to the scrap yard.
This is just one example. There are loads. Like the fleet of Transpennine trains that's been sent back into store after three years because no-one added to the specification "the engines should not wake up the entire town of Scarborough when starting up at 5am". The entire industry is dysfunctional. Every five years the Government wakes up and notices this and thinks "ah, what we need is another reorganisation and a STRATEGY". You can fill in the rest yourself.
The latest "strategy" was the Williams Shapps Plan in May 2021.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
That wasn't a strategy anyway. The irony was that nothing they proposed in the IRP could be delivered, unless they built new tracks, because the ones they proposed to use were either full or unsuitable. So to deliver the IRP, they would have needed *checks notes* HS2.
Yes. What nobody anywhere near government wants to talk about is that scrapping HS2 absolutely stuffs the network. As in "how the hell do we accommodate HS2 services north of Handsacre" stuffed. They genuinely don't know - projections are put there showing LESS capacity on the northern WCML once HS2 opens as they accommodate these new services.
Didn't Rishi work it all out on one of his spreadsheets?
Way off topic - Seattle Times ($) - Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.
That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.
Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.
“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.” . . .
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.” . . .
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB. . . .
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website. . . .
Yup - posted the original Leeham News comments earlier. All the journalists showed up in the comments to offer the whistleblower a writeup. Looks like it turned out to be genuine.
Boeing are in deep shit on this one. Alaska Airlines will be asking for sagans of money to make up for their losses, for a start.
Dominic Gates (an Irishman by the way) is THE top aviation reporter in the USA. Plus a local western Washingtonian (if not a mossback).
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
Unlike some of the others, however, he has really failed to take on the nutters on his own side - which gives the impression of chaos. Worse, he doesn't seem to be capable of understanding it.
The version of the Sunak government people thought they were getting is that. Things being a bit shit but with a diligent, PM as problem solver working to put things back on track (also Starmer's current pitch). Might not have won the Tories the election but would have put them back in the conversation.
Instead they got Braverman, endless rows about a Rwanda policy almost no one among the general public thinks will work, and more party chaos brought about by Sunak offering up the nutters red meat and expecting them to be satisfied, rather than demand more. To the extent there are Tory MPs who will publicly go about arguing for a Truss redux.
Whether or not he's not too bad at the practicalities of being PM is an open question - but he's been absolutely terrible at the politics and party management.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I am up for this as they conscript me as a Field Marshal.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Are you saying Truss had the least annoying voice? Surely not. It’s corporate berating at its most corporate and beraty. And Thatcher’s was annoying but not that bad.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
I'm with Cookie on this, Truss has a bizarrely unannoying voice.
Corbyn is another one who has a surprisingly non annoying voice given how annoying he is as a person. Farage too, weirdly.
Way off topic - Seattle Times ($) - Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.
That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.
Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.
“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.” . . .
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.” . . .
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB. . . .
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website. . . .
Yup - posted the original Leeham News comments earlier. All the journalists showed up in the comments to offer the whistleblower a writeup. Looks like it turned out to be genuine.
Boeing are in deep shit on this one. Alaska Airlines will be asking for sagans of money to make up for their losses, for a start.
Dominic Gates (an Irishman by the way) is THE top aviation reporter in the USA. Plus a local western Washingtonian (if not a mossback).
And Spirit isn't a really separate company - it's a spun off chunk of Boeing that is sole source for a lot of Boeing work. Basically stick a bunch of technical work in a black box so the lawyer and accountants running Boeing don't have to see all that nasty aeronautical stuff and get stuck in detail of how planes don't fall apart.
Joe Lewis, the billionaire and founder of the company who own Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in court on Wednesday.
The 86-year-old British businessman was indicted in the United States in July for “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme”.
This, according to U.S. officials, involved the passing of information to “romantic partners and his private pilots.”
Lewis’ lawyer had at the time of the indictment claimed the government had made “an egregious error in judgment” in charging him and promised to “defend him vigorously in court.”
Lewis pleaded not guilty to all 16 counts on July 25 and his bail was set at $300million, secured against his 98-metre super yacht and aircraft.
However, Lewis — who founded ENIC Sports Inc, the company which owns the vast majority of shares in Spurs — appeared in court in Manhattan on Wednesday to plead guilty to two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
“I am so embarrassed and I apologise to the court for my conduct,” Lewis told U.S. district judge Jessica Clarke, via Reuters.
Sentencing has been set for March with a stipulated guideline range of 18 to 24 months’ imprisonment.
For once in his life, Simon Clarke isn’t wrong. The former chief secretary to the Treasury published a piece in The Daily Telegraph yesterday which looked like it had been written in moonlight using pints of his enemy’s blood. The election would be a “massacre”, he said, the Tories were “sleepwalking towards an avoidable annihilation” and Rishi Sunak “does not get what Britain needs”. Every word of it is correct, except perhaps for “avoidable”.
Clarke is simply saying out loud what other Conservatives keep to themselves, or despair about to their colleagues in whispered conversations in Commons bars. They are doomed. Sky’s polling average puts the Conservatives 20 points behind Labour, a position no party has ever come back from in an election year.
It’s blowing a hoolie in Hamburg where I’m waiting for a flight. I just saw my incoming BA flight land - one of the advantages of an otherwise mediocre lounge is a nice runway view - and it was doing that side to side wobble thing where you wonder if the wing tip will touch the runway. Forget helicopter tours of the Grand Canyon, this is mildly disconcerting.
Tip in mediocre German airport lounges: the best of a bad bunch of drinks is usually weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc, typically mass produced in Pfalz) which every lounge in the nation seems to stock. Better than the fizzy beer.
Thanks, gonna be in Frankfurt in April. I usually go for a Hefeweizzen or however that is spelled.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
Great (and semi-trolling?) header but what a nasty shock to click in and be confronted with a large close-up of that facetious face and stupid stupid hair again.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Given the overall costs for HS2, even digging through quicksand studded with unexploded German bombs, nuclear waste etc would have been cheaper.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Given the overall costs for HS2, even digging through quicksand studded with unexploded German bombs, nuclear waste etc would have been cheaper.
Ah, Boris's Wizard Wheeze to dig a tunnel through Beaufort's Dyke....
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
Unlike some of the others, however, he has really failed to take on the nutters on his own side - which gives the impression of chaos. Worse, he doesn't seem to be capable of understanding it.
The version of the Sunak government people thought they were getting is that. Things being a bit shit but with a diligent, PM as problem solver working to put things back on track (also Starmer's current pitch). Might not have won the Tories the election but would have put them back in the conversation.
Instead they got Braverman, endless rows about a Rwanda policy almost no one among the general public thinks will work, and more party chaos brought about by Sunak offering up the nutters red meat and expecting them to be satisfied, rather than demand more. To the extent there are Tory MPs who will publicly go about arguing for a Truss redux.
Whether or not he's not too bad at the practicalities of being PM is an open question - but he's been absolutely terrible at the politics and party management.
He didn't start by asking the right question- what was a Sunak Premiership for?
The sensible answer would have been to tidy the worst of the mess, get a couple of low controversy personal passion legacy projects on the books. Probably leading to better regards in a decade or so.
Instead, we get these bad mad bets at increasingly poor odds. Anything to move the dial, with more and more panic as the dial refuses to move.
First drumming Greater Spotted Woodpecker of the year in the garden today.
But no sign of the Lesser Spotted Tory Poll Bounce.
Tis a rare wee beastie.
Had a firecrest instead though.
Was watching my local kingfisher hunt about 20 yards away in a rather small pond on the old mill site near here - regular treat on the morning walk and with two goldcrest sightings so far there too. Unfortunately there were half a dozen chaps with telephoto lenses - I worry they will scare it away if it keeps up.
Then he went on to moan about the inconvenience he's been put to in having to prepare a statement over Christmas. Poor chap. He's the victim here.
Not quite - didn't he make out that the poor folk which his charity helps over Christmas weould have been the victims if he'd done a full one? And probably his dog too. [edited for slip]
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Given the overall costs for HS2, even digging through quicksand studded with unexploded German bombs, nuclear waste etc would have been cheaper.
Ah, Boris's Wizard Wheeze to dig a tunnel through Beaufort's Dyke....
Not to mention garden bridges and island airports. Rather like playing those railway system or city building games without the faff of having to find the money and do the politics - you still get the fun.
Then he went on to moan about the inconvenience he's been put to in having to prepare a statement over Christmas. Poor chap. He's the victim here.
And then insisted on reading a personal statement that was all “woe is me” not comprehending that he had just said the exact opposite about someone he prosecuted.
He may have “just” been an investigator but he really did not do himself any favours. All the reports seem to make him out to be a very unpleasant person
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Yet weirdly, HS2 got lots of tunnels in the clays and muds of the south, where it is expensive, and few in the sandstones of the north, where it is cheap. All academic now, since we get neither tunnels nor surface in the north.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Privatisation certainly hasn't helped, but the age of our infrastructure and rolling stock isn't a great thing either.
Not sure where the obscene salaries of train drivers factor in, or if they do.
I wonder if this is actually true. It seems to be about optimizing pricing to gouge last minute business travel and make it very attractive to plan ahead and/or travel off peak.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Yet weirdly, HS2 got lots of tunnels in the clays and muds of the south, where it is expensive, and few in the sandstones of the north, where it is cheap. All academic now, since we get neither tunnels nor surface in the north.
The irony is that all the NIMBYs forced the tunnels and are now complaining about all the air vents that tunnels require.
It’s a great example of be careful of what you ask for as it may be worse than what you would have got by default.
Anyone who lives in Kent will know how little impact HS1 actually had and how it’s almost invisible in a lot of places
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Yet weirdly, HS2 got lots of tunnels in the clays and muds of the south, where it is expensive, and few in the sandstones of the north, where it is cheap. All academic now, since we get neither tunnels nor surface in the north.
The irony is that all the NIMBYs forced the tunnels and are now complaining about all the air vents that tunnels require.
It’s a great example of be careful of what you ask for as it may be worse than what you would have got by default.
Anyone who lives in Kent will know how little impact HS1 actually had and how it’s almost invisible in a lot of places
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I am up for this as they conscript me as a Field Marshal.
I think the most bizarre thing about the current Horizon saga is that despite all of this, the Post Office still use an updated version of Horizon.
It's been tested and 'found to be robust compared to previous systems.'
I mean - really? That's an endorsement? It's like saying somebody is more honest than Goebbels. Or has more knowledge of education than Nick Gibb.
I would have thought any sane organisation would have used paper and an abacus operated by a gorilla in preference to Horizon, but even as I typed that I spotted the flaw in my logic.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
You can often save a lot of money by splitting tickets, but it's a bit of a faff to do so.
I find Trainline is pretty good at splitting the tickets and getting you a cheaper fare.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD
I am now spending so much time OUT of the UK (a bit more than half the year, the last two years) I reckon I am getting a perspective. Or I hope so. Seen from afar Sunak’s government is not that disastrous, relatively, and Sunak himself is far from a disaster. He comes across as honest (unlike Boris), and as sane (unlike Truss) and as personable and articulate (unlike TMay). He is intelligent and kind if a bit unworldly (it seems to me). His wealth is an issue, but on the upside it insulates him from corruption - he does not need to be corrupt
His policies may disappoint many but these are disappointing times for almost every western nation. The west as a whole is in quite steep relative decline and nearly all major western countries face similar and grievous challenges - mass migration, demographic descent, illegal migration, global insecurity, climate change, energy prices, a need to beef up defence even as these societies age, and so on and so forth. Sunak is facing the same problems as Macron, Schulz, Meloni, Biden etc and it is not obvious to me that he is doing notably WORSE than any of them; and its even less obvious that Starmer has the ideas, energy, brilliance that will make things better
Sunak is a perfectly adequate prime minister doing the job of prime minister at maybe the worst possible time in the last 40 years, and he’s a Tory PM at the arse-end of 13 disappointing Tory years
He’s just *unlucky*
You haven’t seen today’s PMQs have you?
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
Minor Rishi gripe: he has a quite annoying voice. I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher 2) Sunak 3) May 4) Major 5) Blair 6) Cameron 7) Johnson 8) Brown 9) Truss
I love this list on what I think is a underrated topic. I think my own list might be:
1 Thatcher (surely top of everyone's list, love her or hate her, that voice is just awful) 2 Sunak (I'm surprised more people didn't immediately notice how annoying he sounds) 3 Johnson (I just think the way he speaks is ridiculous) 4 Cameron (sadist public school prefect) 5 Blair (eager head boy trying and largely failing to sound less posh than he is) 6 May (slightly hectoring tone, like someone objecting to you parking too close to her driveway in a prosperous Surrey village) 7 Truss (perfectly normal voice despite her being batshit crazy) 8 Major (quite lovely tones despite a few weird intonations) 9 Brown (pleasing middle class Scots burr)
The last three I could put in broadly equal place I think, I don't find their voices grating in the least. Overall, we seem to like PMs with annoying voices, or at least elect a lot of them.
You have definitely added value here. I particularly like your summary of May.
The only reason Brown rated 8 rather than 9 on my list was that while he had a pleasing voice, he sounded almost constantly at least slightly pissed off.
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
I am up for this as they conscript me as a Field Marshal.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Privatisation certainly hasn't helped, but the age of our infrastructure and rolling stock isn't a great thing either.
Not sure where the obscene salaries of train drivers factor in, or if they do.
I wonder if this is actually true. It seems to be about optimizing pricing to gouge last minute business travel and make it very attractive to plan ahead and/or travel off peak.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Privatisation certainly hasn't helped, but the age of our infrastructure and rolling stock isn't a great thing either.
Not sure where the obscene salaries of train drivers factor in, or if they do.
I wonder if this is actually true. It seems to be about optimizing pricing to gouge last minute business travel and make it very attractive to plan ahead and/or travel off peak.
For once in his life, Simon Clarke isn’t wrong. The former chief secretary to the Treasury published a piece in The Daily Telegraph yesterday which looked like it had been written in moonlight using pints of his enemy’s blood. The election would be a “massacre”, he said, the Tories were “sleepwalking towards an avoidable annihilation” and Rishi Sunak “does not get what Britain needs”. Every word of it is correct, except perhaps for “avoidable”.
Clarke is simply saying out loud what other Conservatives keep to themselves, or despair about to their colleagues in whispered conversations in Commons bars. They are doomed. Sky’s polling average puts the Conservatives 20 points behind Labour, a position no party has ever come back from in an election year.
But the word 'avoidable' is the key word in Clark's argument. Without it the whole edifice falls down. Thankfully losing is almost certainly not avoidable. Nor should it be.
The big other flaw in Clark's argument is that the truth is it is not in the national or public or Tory interest for anyone the lift a finger to do anything which might even possibly help them win. They need to lose, to lose big and have a chance to rethink sanely what Conservatism is. The voting public have no idea, and nor does the party.
Then he went on to moan about the inconvenience he's been put to in having to prepare a statement over Christmas. Poor chap. He's the victim here.
Not quite - didn't he make out that the poor folk which his charity helps over Christmas weould have been the victims if he'd done a full one? And probably his dog too. [edited for slip]
Is his dog an XXXL Bully?
If so, how many of the poor folk did it eat, along with his homework?
I think the most bizarre thing about the current Horizon saga is that despite all of this, the Post Office still use an updated version of Horizon.
It's been tested and 'found to be robust compared to previous systems.'
I mean - really? That's an endorsement? It's like saying somebody is more honest than Goebbels. Or has more knowledge of education than Nick Gibb.
I would have thought any sane organisation would have used paper and an abacus operated by a gorilla in preference to Horizon, but even as I typed that I spotted the flaw in my logic.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
I think it makes sense that if you build something new you build it at a spec that reflects the technology available. When the Victorian built our rail network in the 1840s they didn't build it for horse drawn carriages. So if we're building a new train line from scratch it should be built to reasonable high speed specifications. AIUI we did over-egg it a bit by building potential for 300mph vs 250mph (or something like that), maybe that was going too far. Better to future proof it though as the costs of upgrading an existing line later are very high as we saw with the WCML. Again AIUI the real excess costs came from burying so much of the southern portion in tunnels to avoid upsetting Tory voters in the Chilterns. The bits that were cancelled in the North were much cheaper. I think we should just build the damn thing all the way to Scotland, we will still be using it in 150 years and it will more than pay for itself. We should have built it years ago in fact. We could have used the North Sea or privatisation revenues instead of giving them away in tax cuts for the rich.
Put the whole thing in a deep tunnel. Would be cheaper than the surface shenanigans.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
It's a nice idea, but you couldn't be more wrong if you were a professor of wrongness at Wrong University.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
The Channel tunnel is following so rather gnarly geology.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
That is so utterly dependent on geology. In bad geology, surface can be far cheaper than tunnelling, even with all the extra expenses. In good geology, tunnelling can be far cheaper, but sometimes operationally more expensive.
Given the overall costs for HS2, even digging through quicksand studded with unexploded German bombs, nuclear waste etc would have been cheaper.
Ah, Boris's Wizard Wheeze to dig a tunnel through Beaufort's Dyke....
Not to mention garden bridges and island airports. Rather like playing those railway system or city building games without the faff of having to find the money and do the politics - you still get the fun.
Moving airports to offshore artificial islands has been done a fair bit.
Given the value of the real estate for Heathrow, the project might even have *made* money.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
Privatisation certainly hasn't helped, but the age of our infrastructure and rolling stock isn't a great thing either.
Not sure where the obscene salaries of train drivers factor in, or if they do.
I wonder if this is actually true. It seems to be about optimizing pricing to gouge last minute business travel and make it very attractive to plan ahead and/or travel off peak.
I think I must only travel on intercities at business peak times.
I had noticed that my travel costs were substantially lower since I never have to travel peak time on a moment's notice any more.
Yes, railways are run for the benefit of older people with time on their hands, enjoy the uncertainties of having no idea whether your train will run but have all day to find out, can book in advance and use a senior rail card. Since retirement this is me. Carry with you: earplugs, cash (as all sorts of facilities suddenly go to cash only when the electronics fail) and a readable very long book, Private Eye and the Economist.
As a way of running a system for busy working people (I was one once) it's appalling and shameful.
Off-topic briefly. Watching Sunak at PMQs I have the horrible realisation that as appalling as Sunak's performance is, he *genuinely* believes he is doing a brilliant job.
OK I’m going to Challenge the Narrative
SUNAK ISN’T THAT BAD He’s just *unlucky*
In the same way Truss surprised on the upside?
No
Sunak is merely a lightning rod for all the dark energy directed at the Tories. If you step back, and think neutrally, he is actually OK
He is playing a terrible hand as well as he can, I do not see anyone else doing any better - which is presumably why a challenge to his leadership never actually eventuates. There is nothing to save the Tories, Sunak is as good as it gets, they are doomed, and I expect Starmer to be a massive disappointment to millions within six months of winning, when everyone realises our problems go beyond “Tory incompetence”
No. Cancelling HS2 was stupid and needless.
I was also irked by the cancellation but the whole concept of HS2 was a fucking catastrophe, from the get go
Britain is so small it does not need 200+ mph trains. That is the truth of it. Sunak probably sees it that way and was trying to extricate HMG from the mess as cheaply as possible. It was and is a calamity he inherited
The HS2 catastrophe is that you still think it was about 200+ mph trains - it never was. It was about freeing up capacity on existing lines. It was, from the start, miss-sold.
No, I understand the capacity argument. But why did the engineers say Well if we’re having more capacity let’s make it 200mph trains?
Just build more standard capacity, fuck the high speed shit. 125mph is easily fast enough for a country as compact and densely populated as the UK
Just make it affordable.
If I want to get from London to Manchester tomorrow for 9 o'clock, it's £224.70 for a standard single. Another £234.70 to add a return after 6pm.
That's a gobsmacking four hundred and sixty quid I'd be out if, say, someone rang me now and asked me to pop up to their office to talk about some new business (yes, I know there's Teams et al, but sometimes people want to, I dunno, actually meet you in person before hiring you).
Round trip in my car, petrol probably about seventy quid.
It's a 400 mile round trip.
That's a good £200 including petrol, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and so on.
Even if you go with the Treasury's parsimonious allowance it's £190.
Not including any parking fees. Not including having to drive for seven or eight hours (and even for that, add the toll on the M6 Toll).
I agree with you it should be cheaper. Much cheaper. But driving isn't quite so ridiculously a cheaper option when you weigh it all up.
Train travel is insanely expensive in the UK, I entirely agree with that
When I take trains abroad in countries with roughly similar wealth-levels as the UK the price of a train ticket is often a third of that in the UK. How do they manage it? Where have we gone wrong?
You can often save a lot of money by splitting tickets, but it's a bit of a faff to do so.
I find Trainline is pretty good at splitting the tickets and getting you a cheaper fare.
Unfortunatement, they charge booking fees!
Yes, but the thing is — you can use their recommendations for splitting tickets, and then book the tickets yourself, so you don't have to pay the commission. Obviously takes a bit longer.
Comments
Con and Ref getting 40% or more between them, but not merging but fighting each other with 20% each would make very few seats for more than 40% of the vote. All those Labour politicians in government no use to the country and more solid than boredom would be shitting their legs off with laughter election after election.
Nick P’s Fantasy Sequence this country does not need at all!
He needs a brutal street-fighter to put him right. They seem very few and far between in the modern Conservative Party.
If he asked me, I'd give him a few steers...
And he has inherited an awful lot of shite policies from prior PMs of all stripes. Migration is a massive issue - but not of his doing. Post Covid health issues are also huge - not his fault
Anyway he’ll be gone this year. And then we will have Starmer’s boring nasal tones explaining why nothing is getting especially better, and he’ll be doing it with extra loads of Wokeness
He will be unpopular after a year and likely loathed after two or three
This would have provided the simplicity, stability and vertical integration that is missing today. Instead the Treasury insisted on the franchising model and so the chaos ensued until we get to where we are today - a fragmented mess. Our trains cost a fortune to administer. Contracts on contracts on contracts. An army of lawyers and middle managers taking money away from the actual service.
Sunak should never have gone into politics, he’s just not very good at it - wrong personality wrong skill sets. In his coming life outside politics he can enjoy so much more successful a career and happier life, if he finds the right job for himself.
This is PB, not some other websites we can think of.
Nothing has really happened since, apart from the establishment of Great British Railways Transition Team.
The Intergrated Rail Plan for the midlands and the north was published in November 2021. But that has been overtaken by the scrapping of HS2 beyond Birmingham.
So DfT is incappable of even undertaking a reorganisation or a strategy that lasts longer than the latest prime minister.
Absolutely straight lines - so that if we want to upgrade to running in an evacuated tunnel at 1,000mph (Troll Troll) - we could.
Bet the Enquiry Wankers demand that it isn't done, though. After all, if there is nothing disturbed on the surface, their jobs go away.
Had Major got his way then we would have had (as an example) LNER. With EU competition rules applied to allow open access competition such as Hull Trains, Grand Central and lumo. Exactly like now at a fraction of the bloody cost.
Perhaps the biggest shame of that era is that his schemes to cut costs on branch lines - the East Anglian Paytrains and so on - weren't adopted more widely. Instead Beeching just cut the lot.
rejoice
I would rank PMs of the last 40 years in terms of the annoyingness of their voices thus:
1) Thatcher
2) Sunak
3) May
4) Major
5) Blair
6) Cameron
7) Johnson
8) Brown
9) Truss
You could maybe have had six or seven companies, most notably putting Scotrail in as an independent company and possibly still keeping Chiltern separate.
But frankly, almost anything would have been better than what transpired.
https://news.sky.com/story/british-army-chiefs-call-to-mobilise-the-nation-in-the-event-of-war-should-be-listened-to-tobias-ellwood-says-13055161
Listening to LBC the patriotic boomers are up for conscription. "I'm 62 and I am up for it".
Easy to say for us fortunate old timers, as we won't be invited.
The 50 to 70s should be called up first. We may be useless in the trenches, but having volunteered first, under the impression we were safe from the call up, the irony would be delicious.
By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.
That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.
Last week, an anonymous whistleblower — who appears to have access to Boeing’s manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout — on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.
“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.” . . .
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.” . . .
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB. . . .
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website. . . .
Like you I can think of a whole stack of reasons why not to recreate the Big 4. But we're part way there with the current gWr franchise and integrating intercity and local services has been hugely better than having them separate.
Voice-wise I would place Johnson, Cameron and Brown best, and Truss and Blair worst.
Cheaper than petrol.
No parking costs.
I can read on the journey.
And much quicker. (Except this morning due to storm-related faff.)
As for bus companies, I'm not so sure. Do you know how many bus companies prior to 1948 were either wholly or partly railway owned? Starting with the largest, Midland Red.
Boeing are in deep shit on this one. Alaska Airlines will be asking for sagans of money to make up for their losses, for a start.
Tip in mediocre German airport lounges: the best of a bad bunch of drinks is usually weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc, typically mass produced in Pfalz) which every lounge in the nation seems to stock. Better than the fizzy beer.
Starmer's voice is also annoying but not as annoying as Rishi's.
In order to improve the railways, we need to do the following.
1. Allocate a sum of money, after which the Treasury have no further involvement.
2. Ignore the necessity of showing results before the next election.
3. Allow practical engineers to design, install, maintain and operate the railways.
4. Avoid, wherever possible, the use of consultants.
5. Have one integrated national rail system, with proper integration with buses, ferries, etc.
6. Ignore NIMBYs when planning infrastructure improvements. Simplify and speed up planning applications. Don’t let newts and shrews prevent necessary improvements.
7. Infrastructure structure improvements to be designed to increase capacity, remove bottlenecks and allow for separation of trains running at different speeds. Fast and slow four track running lines, which would also allow trains to swap tracks in an emergency, would provide more flexibility than building brand new lines.
8. Reduce and simplify fares to attract custom.
9. Run longer trains when needed, rather than overcrowded four carriage Cross Country slums on wheels.
10. Don’t gold plate everything, New stations shouldn’t cost £2 million.
Close your eyes and Rishi sounds quite like Blair.
1 Thatcher (surely top of everyone's list, love her or hate her, that voice is just awful)
2 Sunak (I'm surprised more people didn't immediately notice how annoying he sounds)
3 Johnson (I just think the way he speaks is ridiculous)
4 Cameron (sadist public school prefect)
5 Blair (eager head boy trying and largely failing to sound less posh than he is)
6 May (slightly hectoring tone, like someone objecting to you parking too close to her driveway in a prosperous Surrey village)
7 Truss (perfectly normal voice despite her being batshit crazy)
8 Major (quite lovely tones despite a few weird intonations)
9 Brown (pleasing middle class Scots burr)
The last three I could put in broadly equal place I think, I don't find their voices grating in the least. Overall, we seem to like PMs with annoying voices, or at least elect a lot of them.
Make it easy for lots of clowns to bid, because competition between clowns ensures you get the best clowns.
The version of the Sunak government people thought they were getting is that. Things being a bit shit but with a diligent, PM as problem solver working to put things back on track (also Starmer's current pitch). Might not have won the Tories the election but would have put them back in the conversation.
Instead they got Braverman, endless rows about a Rwanda policy almost no one among the general public thinks will work, and more party chaos brought about by Sunak offering up the nutters red meat and expecting them to be satisfied, rather than demand more. To the extent there are Tory MPs who will publicly go about arguing for a Truss redux.
Whether or not he's not too bad at the practicalities of being PM is an open question - but he's been absolutely terrible at the politics and party management.
Take a look at the Channel Tunnel: in an ideal world, it would have perfect gradient down, then be level under than channel, and be in a straight line. Instead, it is all over the place, particularly in profile.
Although it is easier when not going under the sea, long tunnels are rarely fully direct. Bromford Tunnel on HS2 has a big (though high-speed0 kink in it, as an example. The Northolt Tunnels are not quite straight, either.
Something else that Musky Baby's idiotic Hyperloop didn't notice (Troll Troll)
Incidentally, tunnels also require surface installations every so often; in ye oden days these were access points for construction, some of which became ventilation; now they're for ventilation and (sometimes) emergency evacuation every 3km or so.
Had a firecrest instead though.
"Britain on the brink of war?: Farage calls for negotiations to prevent 'death on a massive scale'"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot5fFPp6mic
Joe Lewis, the billionaire and founder of the company who own Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in court on Wednesday.
The 86-year-old British businessman was indicted in the United States in July for “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme”.
This, according to U.S. officials, involved the passing of information to “romantic partners and his private pilots.”
Lewis’ lawyer had at the time of the indictment claimed the government had made “an egregious error in judgment” in charging him and promised to “defend him vigorously in court.”
Lewis pleaded not guilty to all 16 counts on July 25 and his bail was set at $300million, secured against his 98-metre super yacht and aircraft.
However, Lewis — who founded ENIC Sports Inc, the company which owns the vast majority of shares in Spurs — appeared in court in Manhattan on Wednesday to plead guilty to two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
“I am so embarrassed and I apologise to the court for my conduct,” Lewis told U.S. district judge Jessica Clarke, via Reuters.
Sentencing has been set for March with a stipulated guideline range of 18 to 24 months’ imprisonment.
https://theathletic.com/5224427/2024/01/24/joe-lewis-case-tottenham-2/?source=user_shared_article
Where's Mandy Rice-Davies when we need her?"
Clarke is simply saying out loud what other Conservatives keep to themselves, or despair about to their colleagues in whispered conversations in Commons bars. They are doomed. Sky’s polling average puts the Conservatives 20 points behind Labour, a position no party has ever come back from in an election year.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-trapped-lunacy-and-extinction-2870592?ico=most_popular
The role of Internet spiv could have been made for him.
I was exaggerating (slightly) - but the basic point stands, if the Enquiry Wankers want to turn everything into a zillion pound 2 decade nonsense, dig underneath them. It will be cheaper in the end.
"Post Office Inquiry: Ex-investigator insists wrongly convicted victim still guilty"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxY76ZHosUI
LEAST ANNOYING VOICE
The sensible answer would have been to tidy the worst of the mess, get a couple of low controversy personal passion legacy projects on the books. Probably leading to better regards in a decade or so.
Instead, we get these bad mad bets at increasingly poor odds. Anything to move the dial, with more and more panic as the dial refuses to move.
He may have “just” been an investigator but he really did not do himself any favours. All the reports seem to make him out to be a very unpleasant person
All academic now, since we get neither tunnels nor surface in the north.
https://www.seat61.com/uk-europe-train-fares-comparison.html
It’s a great example of be careful of what you ask for as it may be worse than what you would have got by default.
Anyone who lives in Kent will know how little impact HS1 actually had and how it’s almost invisible in a lot of places
It's been tested and 'found to be robust compared to previous systems.'
I mean - really? That's an endorsement? It's like saying somebody is more honest than Goebbels. Or has more knowledge of education than Nick Gibb.
I would have thought any sane organisation would have used paper and an abacus operated by a gorilla in preference to Horizon, but even as I typed that I spotted the flaw in my logic.
The only reason Brown rated 8 rather than 9 on my list was that while he had a pleasing voice, he sounded almost constantly at least slightly pissed off.
I think I must only travel on intercities at business peak times.
The big other flaw in Clark's argument is that the truth is it is not in the national or public or Tory interest for anyone the lift a finger to do anything which might even possibly help them win. They need to lose, to lose big and have a chance to rethink sanely what Conservatism is. The voting public have no idea, and nor does the party.
If so, how many of the poor folk did it eat, along with his homework?
Given the value of the real estate for Heathrow, the project might even have *made* money.
As a way of running a system for busy working people (I was one once) it's appalling and shameful.