Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
One never ceases to be amazed at her ability to find people who share her worldview and then to present them as proof of a trend.
I rarely find people with a strong view either way on such matters. More concerned about their soccer team, what they are doing at the weekend and the weather. Perhaps I should look harder.
Don't forget she is also a renowned authority on the trans issue and regularly appears as a talking head to discuss it due to her undoubted knowledge although she did duck a debate on it with Ishmael when he was around these parts. Didn't want to trounce him with her knowledge.
Well if we are going to doubt integrity, I would question someone who claims to always vote Labour and then bellyaches when posters are "nasty" to the Conservatives.
Disliking a particular style of political invective, the crude, the vulgar, the ad hominem attack, and calling out the people who do it does not indicated ones politics either way.
It's not far-fetched that people on here have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and contacts. I know that I do. People can choose whether to believe it or not but that is a call for them to make. I tend to believe people on here when they talk about personal experience because I don't see the point of anonymous people lying to other anonymous people. Life is too short, surely!
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
I used to be a road sweeper ( seriously ! it was my summer job ) Bin man too.
I used to be a dishwasher at a holiday camp in Blackpool.
3 months for me flipping burgers, cleaning out deep fat fryers and lugging stock upstairs in a Wimpy!
I spent a few months pulling pints in a British Legion. It was quite fun. I used to help myself to a few off the top shelf before I left. Glad it was walking distance.
I was briefly in clacton last year after a camping trip in Essex. What a deplorably run down place it was. Drug dealers on the streets. People in dirty worn down clothes. People had hard lives etched in their faces.
When I listen to people like in this video, it hammers home to me that there are several kinds of poverty: lack of money, lack of network, lack of information and knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of power and voice. They seem decoupled from any participation in the collective project that is our country.
And behind that are locations that have no overall economic function or connection with the broader national and global economy - they don't participate in the structural circulation of money, goods, people, ideas that is necessary for them to be viable. These locations are literal dead ends.
The citizens talk about being a holiday town. They were killed off by easy jet and Ryan Air and being a holiday town won't ever properly recover. Those times are gone. Why would you go to blackpool or clacton if you can be in Malaga for £80 return?
They talk about fixing the buildings.... to what end? The buildings need a role to play in the town, which itself needs a role in a broader economy. There needs to be a total rethink about the purpose of these towns... because it isn't tourism. Not till these seaside towns are integrated into the broader economic circulation of the nation will we begin to address these issues. Saying it is an issue of individual tax cuts or individual moral fortitude totally misses the point of what is going on in my mind.
Blackpool is reasonably well connected to large population centres and airports, so it shouldn’t be beyond help and I don’t think tourism need be completely out of the question. But it would probably require huge corporate investment, Las Vegas style.
Creating a special economic area for places like this, slashing corporate taxes (and possibly personal taxes) and removing all planning restrictions beyond the protection of a handful of existing buildings and the usual building regs might get it somewhere.
They should have built that massive casino resort there, that was talked about 15 years ago, and recruited one of the big Vegas operators to run it. It would have bought a whole load of secondary investment in hotels and other leisure activities.
Yes I’d run it as a free zone until it’s back on its feet, then setup another similar free zone in Clacton or Margate and repeat the exercise.
Margate doesn’t need it anymore. Pretty bourgeois these days but still with its cockney on sea edge. East Kent is though a desert of non-tourism / non-agricultural employment since Pfizer closed down its R&D centre there. But that’s a wider problem than Margate. The area’s future probably is more tourism, including wine tourism and hopefully a return of French school trips if Starmer’s government can make some sensible changes on the border.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
Sorry, liked that you're a postie, not that you're overworked!
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
@selebiab, thank you: I'll try and have a look sometime. Thanks for the sources. A brief skim and the media coverage supports my head canon that the law on trans will/has evolved in the same way as the law on gambling did in the 19/20th century, so I'll try to get an article out in a week or two. Will probably have to go backstage (what @MoonRabbit refers to as "the toilets") given the kerfuffle.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
This post is quite interesting because, buried beneath the slightly frustrated obligation you feel to defend one of your own side there, is a recognition that you also acknowledge much of "her" claims are synthetic and insincere.
Why does it matter?
Because if people are going to make a claim to authority in support of one of their arguments that can only credibly be done if it's true.
No-one asks the same of Dura on Defence, Ydoethur on Education or Foxy on Health, MarqueeMark on Media, JohnO on being a lead councillor, MaxPB or TSE on financial services, Roger on the Oscars, and Leon on flintknapping, even when all of us may not always fully agree with them.
You could have just said "its easier to shoot the messenger".
We get lot. Your lot are not just going down in flames, they are repeatedly blowing themselves up. When you generously consider your side to the right and everyone else to be wrong, I get how frustrating that would be.
We need more Tory voices on here. On the inside. Explaining what the plan is and how the party drags itself out of the gutter and rebuilds. So don't get the arse when people point out that you've got the arse. Nobody likes losing. Get that. Not her fault.
Err, this isn't about "my lot" or "your lot" but it's interesting that you think it is because that says an awful lot about how you filter other people's posts, regardless of what they are.
It's about the fact @Heathener is a hypocritical troll who can't stand being called out on it and who shouldn't be taken seriously by a single person on here.
Of course, even "her" supporters know this - but they feel they need to defend it through gritted teeth, which explains the wonderful contortions some are going through this morning as they attempt to do it.
Blimey Casino, you get angrier every day. I'd get that blood pressure checked if I were you.
Besides which, when he says "my lot" as in me filtering people out, which lot does he imagine I am? I am neither Labour nor Tory, yet it reads like if I am not one of his lot (Tory) then I must be the other lot (Labour) and ignore his lot. Did I not post that we need MORE Tories on here? Not less? I want to hear from his lot. Without him calling anyone who isn't him a troll.
Given your ambition to be an MP I am surprised we havent had a photo of your genetalia.
Send us a pic, youre among friends we wont do anything that might embarass you.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
It looks like Durham Council are planning something similar, from the press reports, in Spennymoor.
Last time I was down there, visiting a company on the outskirts, I was amazed at quite how much housebuilding was going on. This was about three years ago. It did seem to have a rather vibrant feel to it. Mind you so did Hartlepool with all the housebuilding along the A690 corridor.
It's not far-fetched that people on here have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and contacts. I know that I do. People can choose whether to believe it or not but that is a call for them to make. I tend to believe people on here when they talk about personal experience because I don't see the point of anonymous people lying to other anonymous people. Life is too short, surely!
I agree but when people say "I am an expert on this, you have to take my word for it", and do little to back it up, even when challenged, is it any wonder people are questioning or cynical.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
I think you have to balance the positive brand equity from the old fame against the negative inertia a former industry can exert, and consider how easy the reinventions might be.
Blackpool’s brand seems to me still valuable enough for its future to be tourism and fun. Whereas Clacton, no. Clacton given its location is surely best placed simply as a pleasantly leafed-up retirement town, so maybe what it really needs is some civic beautification and a bit of Britain in Bloom.
Then there are places like Skegness: little tourism anymore, no rich urban hinterland, not a big retirement draw unlike the South Coast. What to do? I’d say industrialise. Tax free zone up to Teesside, get the factories in.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
For all those of you who do cruises, can you tell me if the bathrooms have a bath (as opposed to just a shower)?
If you want a bath, you’re likely in an expensive suite rather than a standard room. But yes, you can get bathrooms with baths. 90% of the rooms will have only showers.
My wife too.
??
I usually get in trouble if hotel rooms only have showers, as she likes her bath!
Ah right, I'm with your wife there.
(Er...)
For the bath lovers a little add, I have made a couple of sets of stainless steel chain mail now so you can bathe without worrying about being stabbed nods...or going rusty
Whilst this is a response to my question, I'm not sure it constitutes an answer...😀
Advise drysuits, which can be folded and filled with a jug.
Good luck with the divorce.
Ok, there is definitely something weird here... ☹️
I’d be surprised if 1946-47 was a better harvest than this one is going to be and that’s ‘since the Second World War.’
But yes, it’s clearly going to be a terrible year for agriculture and it’s about the fifth in a row as well.
A proportion of winter cereal never got drilled - say 15% and a similar proportion has been so affected by waterlogging that it will barely be worth swlvaging. Combine that with late harvested crops like beet and potatoes which have rotted, or where harvested has caused tremendous damage to soil structure and there will definitely be reduced output and higher prices.
But agriculture has to work better with nature too. Some of the failed crops will be on fields that really shouldn’t be in arable. Too heavy, too low lying. The climate is changing and we need to adapt to it.
I'm assuming that one outcome of this will be "but farmers need more subsidies from the taxpayers."
I might be quite hopeful for this once we are after the election and have a Government (rather than a pack of headless chickens). I'd like to see more of an emphasis on Ukraine style field margins, especially in "prairie field faming" areas of the UK - which would increase land stability AND boost forest cover AND potentially boost harvests AND could be used to gain a far better solution for public access like Wales or hopefully Scotland.
Would Labour do it? I'm not sure, but our Public Footpaths' network is massively neglected. One straw in the wind is Rights' of Way teams being integrated into "Highways" in local authorities, as anything in Local Government continues to be slashed and burned from the centre.
The Conservatives can't ever do that, as they are joined at the hip to the landowner lobby, who always want to reduce public access in quantity and quality.
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
It's not far-fetched that people on here have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and contacts. I know that I do. People can choose whether to believe it or not but that is a call for them to make. I tend to believe people on here when they talk about personal experience because I don't see the point of anonymous people lying to other anonymous people. Life is too short, surely!
I agree but when people say "I am an expert on this, you have to take my word for it", and do little to back it up, even when challenged, is it any wonder people are questioning or cynical.
Yep - if you specifically claim to be an expert on something, be prepared to demonstrate it.
For all those of you who do cruises, can you tell me if the bathrooms have a bath (as opposed to just a shower)?
If you want a bath, you’re likely in an expensive suite rather than a standard room. But yes, you can get bathrooms with baths. 90% of the rooms will have only showers.
My wife too.
??
I usually get in trouble if hotel rooms only have showers, as she likes her bath!
Ah right, I'm with your wife there.
(Er...)
For the bath lovers a little add, I have made a couple of sets of stainless steel chain mail now so you can bathe without worrying about being stabbed nods...or going rusty
Whilst this is a response to my question, I'm not sure it constitutes an answer...😀
Advise drysuits, which can be folded and filled with a jug.
Good luck with the divorce.
Ok, there is definitely something weird here... ☹️
You could be a yachtie or surfer, who has them anyway !
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
It looks like Durham Council are planning something similar, from the press reports, in Spennymoor.
Last time I was down there, visiting a company on the outskirts, I was amazed at quite how much housebuilding was going on. This was about three years ago. It did seem to have a rather vibrant feel to it. Mind you so did Hartlepool with all the housebuilding along the A690 corridor.
Housebuilding isn't necessarily vibrancy. Remember that the Tories rigged the system in favour of developers: 1 Council needs to build government approved numbers of new homes 2 Council approves developer planning applications 3 Developer doesn't build them 4 Council found in breach of its local plan which means 5 Developer can build what and where they like without restriction
So many of the houses being built in these places are not what these places need - affordable homes. With actual planning so that there are roads and schools and doctors and shops. Stockton has been hit by developers doing what they like and its causing gridlock. Same in eastern Rochdale.
Sunak will be judged on the the nationwide test of the local and mayoral elections, Blackpool will be a footnote. As Blackpool would always have been a nailed on Conservative loss, I don't think it'll have the same impact as a loss in seats where they are defending a much larger majority.
What's noticeable here is the total lack of Reform candidates on the published candidate nominations. And Conservative councillors will mostly have built up a local reputation will mean that many are judged on their own merits and not against the car crash of this government. None of that applies in a general election of course.
So I can see the Conservatives significantly outperforming against expectations in the locals. Overall I think the May elections will overall throw Sunak a lifeline by virtue of the results being misinterpreted as if they were a general election, rather than being the catalyst for a leadership challenge.
In similar situations (by-election on same day as locals), the by-election has often led the news reporting. I don't think it will be a footnote. Although that does depend on the result: a more shocking result (huge swing, Reform UK 2nd, or Tories managing to hold, etc.) will get more coverage.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
One never ceases to be amazed at her ability to find people who share her worldview and then to present them as proof of a trend.
I rarely find people with a strong view either way on such matters. More concerned about their soccer team, what they are doing at the weekend and the weather. Perhaps I should look harder.
Don't forget she is also a renowned authority on the trans issue and regularly appears as a talking head to discuss it due to her undoubted knowledge although she did duck a debate on it with Ishmael when he was around these parts. Didn't want to trounce him with her knowledge.
Well if we are going to doubt integrity, I would question someone who claims to always vote Labour and then bellyaches when posters are "nasty" to the Conservatives.
Disliking a particular style of political invective, the crude, the vulgar, the ad hominem attack, and calling out the people who do it does not indicated ones politics either way.
It does when one writes that no one attacks Labour/LD/SNP/Green/Plaid/Ind. for their corruption but everyone attacks the poor Tories.
On your terms you should be outraged at Casino's attack on Rayner for liking the opera.
And behind that are locations that have no overall economic function or connection with the broader national and global economy - they don't participate in the structural circulation of money, goods, people, ideas that is necessary for them to be viable. These locations are literal dead ends.
I recently went to some shit hole near Lowestoft to buy a car (E30 325i, only wanted the ECU. LOL.) It felt like it took me three days and cost a thousand quid to get there on the train and when I got there the place was absolutely fucked in the way you describe. One street had a row of derelict shops with a fucking tree growing out of the roof of one of them. That's how long that place had been completely fucked - long enough for trees to grow out of the abandoned shops.
It sometimes feels like there are two distinct nations living inside the same borders and they have very little contact with each other. One group has eight types of vinegar in their kitchen and the other picks up fag ends in the streets for their kids' birthday present.
#classicdom was definitely on to something with leveling up but his solution of Brexit was like trying treat dysentery by giving the patient a rotten kebab.
But you would be wrong about two distinct nations. Huge tracts of the north of England (the bit I know best) have massive populations between these extremes. As a whole this population generates very little news or media coverage, and from the outside are pretty boring.
In general news coverage magnifies the total significance of small groups, just as you would never know from the media that homicide in this country is very very rare.
BTW growing a tree through then roof of the house is a precondition of staging an amateur performance of Die Walkure in your street.
And behind that are locations that have no overall economic function or connection with the broader national and global economy - they don't participate in the structural circulation of money, goods, people, ideas that is necessary for them to be viable. These locations are literal dead ends.
I recently went to some shit hole near Lowestoft to buy a car (E30 325i, only wanted the ECU. LOL.) It felt like it took me three days and cost a thousand quid to get there on the train and when I got there the place was absolutely fucked in the way you describe. One street had a row of derelict shops with a fucking tree growing out of the roof of one of them. That's how long that place had been completely fucked - long enough for trees to grow out of the abandoned shops.
It sometimes feels like there are two distinct nations living inside the same borders and they have very little contact with each other. One group has eight types of vinegar in their kitchen and the other picks up fag ends in the streets for their kids' birthday present.
#classicdom was definitely on to something with leveling up but his solution of Brexit was like trying treat dysentery by giving the patient a rotten kebab.
Regional inequality is definitely a key issue. However, I always thought "leveling up" was an unfortunate phrase as it maintains a vertical up down kind of thinking that limited how politicians were able to propose solutions. To me it has always been about inclusion and integration as a response to exclusion. These areas don't feel like they have meaningful participation and hence experience deep resentment.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
This post is quite interesting because, buried beneath the slightly frustrated obligation you feel to defend one of your own side there, is a recognition that you also acknowledge much of "her" claims are synthetic and insincere.
Why does it matter?
Because if people are going to make a claim to authority in support of one of their arguments that can only credibly be done if it's true.
No-one asks the same of Dura on Defence, Ydoethur on Education or Foxy on Health, MarqueeMark on Media, JohnO on being a lead councillor, MaxPB or TSE on financial services, Roger on the Oscars, and Leon on flintknapping, even when all of us may not always fully agree with them.
You could have just said "its easier to shoot the messenger".
We get lot. Your lot are not just going down in flames, they are repeatedly blowing themselves up. When you generously consider your side to the right and everyone else to be wrong, I get how frustrating that would be.
We need more Tory voices on here. On the inside. Explaining what the plan is and how the party drags itself out of the gutter and rebuilds. So don't get the arse when people point out that you've got the arse. Nobody likes losing. Get that. Not her fault.
Err, this isn't about "my lot" or "your lot" but it's interesting that you think it is because that says an awful lot about how you filter other people's posts, regardless of what they are.
It's about the fact @Heathener is a hypocritical troll who can't stand being called out on it and who shouldn't be taken seriously by a single person on here.
Of course, even "her" supporters know this - but they feel they need to defend it through gritted teeth, which explains the wonderful contortions some are going through this morning as they attempt to do it.
Blimey Casino, you get angrier every day. I'd get that blood pressure checked if I were you.
Besides which, when he says "my lot" as in me filtering people out, which lot does he imagine I am? I am neither Labour nor Tory, yet it reads like if I am not one of his lot (Tory) then I must be the other lot (Labour) and ignore his lot. Did I not post that we need MORE Tories on here? Not less? I want to hear from his lot. Without him calling anyone who isn't him a troll.
Given your ambition to be an MP I am surprised we havent had a photo of your genetalia.
Send us a pic, youre among friends we wont do anything that might embarass you.
Honest.
Although, he's not a Tory is he?
He's a LibDem, I expect much wilder things. His bondage dungeon is a sight to behold.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
This post is quite interesting because, buried beneath the slightly frustrated obligation you feel to defend one of your own side there, is a recognition that you also acknowledge much of "her" claims are synthetic and insincere.
Why does it matter?
Because if people are going to make a claim to authority in support of one of their arguments that can only credibly be done if it's true.
No-one asks the same of Dura on Defence, Ydoethur on Education or Foxy on Health, MarqueeMark on Media, JohnO on being a lead councillor, MaxPB or TSE on financial services, Roger on the Oscars, and Leon on flintknapping, even when all of us may not always fully agree with them.
You could have just said "its easier to shoot the messenger".
We get lot. Your lot are not just going down in flames, they are repeatedly blowing themselves up. When you generously consider your side to the right and everyone else to be wrong, I get how frustrating that would be.
We need more Tory voices on here. On the inside. Explaining what the plan is and how the party drags itself out of the gutter and rebuilds. So don't get the arse when people point out that you've got the arse. Nobody likes losing. Get that. Not her fault.
Err, this isn't about "my lot" or "your lot" but it's interesting that you think it is because that says an awful lot about how you filter other people's posts, regardless of what they are.
It's about the fact @Heathener is a hypocritical troll who can't stand being called out on it and who shouldn't be taken seriously by a single person on here.
Of course, even "her" supporters know this - but they feel they need to defend it through gritted teeth, which explains the wonderful contortions some are going through this morning as they attempt to do it.
Blimey Casino, you get angrier every day. I'd get that blood pressure checked if I were you.
I don't think I'm the angry one on here this morning, mate. In fact, I'm calmly sipping my coffee before I get down to work. The sun is out, and it's going to be a great day.
Try it.
Glad to hear it - wouldn't want you keeling over in a fit of rage.
No sun here, sadly. Off soon for my weekly stint at Citizens Advice - trying to help some people from Dura's 'parallel nation'.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
The majority of mining areas are much improved on what they were a generation or more back - economically, educationally, medically, residentially and especially environmentally.
Town centres apart but town centres have been struggling since the arrival of out of town supermarkets and then the internet.
However those mining areas are located in the middle of the country, with motorways running through them and with major cities nearby.
The parts of the country which are really struggling are coastal and usually with poor communications.
While some other coastal areas suffer from the opposite effect of too much outside money driving out the locals.
It's not far-fetched that people on here have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and contacts. I know that I do. People can choose whether to believe it or not but that is a call for them to make. I tend to believe people on here when they talk about personal experience because I don't see the point of anonymous people lying to other anonymous people. Life is too short, surely!
I agree but when people say "I am an expert on this, you have to take my word for it", and do little to back it up, even when challenged, is it any wonder people are questioning or cynical.
Yep - if you specifically claim to be an expert on something, be prepared to demonstrate it.
I am endlessly amazed at the breadth of expertise in one particular area.
It's not far-fetched that people on here have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and contacts. I know that I do. People can choose whether to believe it or not but that is a call for them to make. I tend to believe people on here when they talk about personal experience because I don't see the point of anonymous people lying to other anonymous people. Life is too short, surely!
I agree but when people say "I am an expert on this, you have to take my word for it", and do little to back it up, even when challenged, is it any wonder people are questioning or cynical.
Yep - if you specifically claim to be an expert on something, be prepared to demonstrate it.
I am endlessly amazed at the breadth of expertise in one particular area.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
@selebiab, thank you: I'll try and have a look sometime. Thanks for the sources. A brief skim and the media coverage supports my head canon that the law on trans will/has evolved in the same way as the law on gambling did in the 19/20th century, so I'll try to get an article out in a week or two. Will probably have to go backstage (what @MoonRabbit refers to as "the toilets") given the kerfuffle.
Apologies for misspelling your name. My fingers have got a head cold. 😀
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
They do something like that out here in the sandpit, with a separate ‘grey’ water system that they use for irrigation, which is partially-treated waste water. The fresh mains water mostly comes from desalination, which is bloody expensive so it makes sense not to use it for watering the plants. Rainwater runoff is also separate, and goes either into ponds or into the grey water supply.
And behind that are locations that have no overall economic function or connection with the broader national and global economy - they don't participate in the structural circulation of money, goods, people, ideas that is necessary for them to be viable. These locations are literal dead ends.
I recently went to some shit hole near Lowestoft to buy a car (E30 325i, only wanted the ECU. LOL.) It felt like it took me three days and cost a thousand quid to get there on the train and when I got there the place was absolutely fucked in the way you describe. One street had a row of derelict shops with a fucking tree growing out of the roof of one of them. That's how long that place had been completely fucked - long enough for trees to grow out of the abandoned shops.
It sometimes feels like there are two distinct nations living inside the same borders and they have very little contact with each other. One group has eight types of vinegar in their kitchen and the other picks up fag ends in the streets for their kids' birthday present.
#classicdom was definitely on to something with leveling up but his solution of Brexit was like trying treat dysentery by giving the patient a rotten kebab.
IMV it's rather more complex than that. I've got to know loads of places through walking, encountering them for the first time as I strolled through. And you get an impression of the place doing so. Yet if I go back for a visit and take a different route, I can get a very different view. Sometimes even a few streets away can have a rather different feel. Even the weather can influence that.
And the same is true for our cities; and even individual streets, as I think Douglas Adams pointed out. 'Poor' and 'rich' areas can exist in very close proximity.
As for trees growing out of derelict shops: yes, that happens. But that's also always happened, and should probably happen forever if we want healthy settlements. Things get older and need rebuilding or repurposing. Whilst we wait for that to happen, it looks sh*t. That's been the case of the Becketwell Lane area of Derby, for instance, which had a very poor sixties shopping arcade that was slowly abandoned and became an eyesore. It is now being redeveloped and repurposed.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
Could someone please post a picture of a dog for scale?
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
Thhank-you for that - it's an interesting example which looks to be good, in that they use the sensible bits that will continue working themselves, but have avoided the complexities and gimmicks that were rather a feature of the New Labour / Gordon Brown period (eg rainwater harvesting for use inside the house, which requires an entirely separate grey water reuse system).
I'd slightly dispute your timing in that I think SUDs has been a basic for quite a lot longer than that.
One benefit that is not afaics identified is the 10s of 1000s of ponds and wet areas created by such systems. Any substantial development can have scores of these, and initiatives correctly bemoaning loss of village ponds have not afaics noticed these yet.
One smallish housing development I did (110 houses, 10 acres) required a balancing pond which was nearly half an acre. Equally another development locally got it wrong and built a concrete impound that was like an inland dock that had to be fenced off for the safety of the public.
As with all of our stock, I think the stuff makes a small contribution, but that the real issue is existing stock - just like energy reduction.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
@selebiab, thank you: I'll try and have a look sometime. Thanks for the sources. A brief skim and the media coverage supports my head canon that the law on trans will/has evolved in the same way as the law on gambling did in the 19/20th century, so I'll try to get an article out in a week or two. Will probably have to go backstage (what @MoonRabbit refers to as "the toilets") given the kerfuffle.
Apologies for misspelling your name. My fingers have got a head cold. 😀
I quite like it
Article sounds interesting - I hope you publish get it on the front page rather than the toilets, but please VM me if the latter.
Strictly, there are two main trans debates at the moment. The legal one - self ID, single sex spaces etc and then the one around interventions for children with gender dysphoria. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover - those more 'gender critical' are unlikely to support pharmaceutical interventions for gender in children, I expect and those very much on the affirmative size are probably itching to whip out their scalpels for penis/breast removal, but there's also a group that's fairly relaxed about the legal side but has reservations about puberty blockers etc.
Being a good centrist dad, I'm somewhere in the middle on both issues And being a good* scientist I want more evidence on both issues.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
I have only ever been to Blackpool once. I was staying in the genteel Inn at Whitewell during one of the COVID lockdown respites. I thought to myself I've never been to Blackpool let's give it a whirl, it's only half an hour away. My wife assured me I would regret this choice. My overarching memory of Scott Benton's Blackpool is that at approximately 11am I spied a drunk urinating on the pavement opposite the Tower ballroom. No furtive piddle against the bus stop wall. There he was, todger in hand spraying the litter and dog dirt with gay abandon.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
Could someone please post a picture of a dog for scale?
I include a picture of a dog for scale in every post, just saying.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
This post is quite interesting because, buried beneath the slightly frustrated obligation you feel to defend one of your own side there, is a recognition that you also acknowledge much of "her" claims are synthetic and insincere.
Why does it matter?
Because if people are going to make a claim to authority in support of one of their arguments that can only credibly be done if it's true.
No-one asks the same of Dura on Defence, Ydoethur on Education or Foxy on Health, MarqueeMark on Media, JohnO on being a lead councillor, MaxPB or TSE on financial services, Roger on the Oscars, and Leon on flintknapping, even when all of us may not always fully agree with them.
You could have just said "its easier to shoot the messenger".
We get lot. Your lot are not just going down in flames, they are repeatedly blowing themselves up. When you generously consider your side to the right and everyone else to be wrong, I get how frustrating that would be.
We need more Tory voices on here. On the inside. Explaining what the plan is and how the party drags itself out of the gutter and rebuilds. So don't get the arse when people point out that you've got the arse. Nobody likes losing. Get that. Not her fault.
Err, this isn't about "my lot" or "your lot" but it's interesting that you think it is because that says an awful lot about how you filter other people's posts, regardless of what they are.
It's about the fact @Heathener is a hypocritical troll who can't stand being called out on it and who shouldn't be taken seriously by a single person on here.
Of course, even "her" supporters know this - but they feel they need to defend it through gritted teeth, which explains the wonderful contortions some are going through this morning as they attempt to do it.
Blimey Casino, you get angrier every day. I'd get that blood pressure checked if I were you.
Besides which, when he says "my lot" as in me filtering people out, which lot does he imagine I am? I am neither Labour nor Tory, yet it reads like if I am not one of his lot (Tory) then I must be the other lot (Labour) and ignore his lot. Did I not post that we need MORE Tories on here? Not less? I want to hear from his lot. Without him calling anyone who isn't him a troll.
Given your ambition to be an MP I am surprised we havent had a photo of your genetalia.
Send us a pic, youre among friends we wont do anything that might embarass you.
Honest.
Although, he's not a Tory is he?
He's a LibDem, I expect much wilder things. His bondage dungeon is a sight to behold.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Do you not also do Avebury from time to time, of interest to us sci fi geeks too.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
Thhank-you for that - it's an interesting example which looks to be good, in that they use the sensible bits that will continue working themselves, but have avoided the complexities and gimmicks that were rather a feature of the New Labour / Gordon Brown period (eg rainwater harvesting for use inside the house, which requires an entirely separate grey water reuse system).
I'd slightly dispute your timing in that I think SUDs has been a basic for quite a lot longer than that.
One benefit that is not afaics identified is the 10s of 1000s of ponds and wet areas created by such systems. Any substantial development can have scores of these, and initiatives correctly bemoaning loss of village ponds have not afaics noticed these yet.
One smallish housing development I did (110 houses, 10 acres) required a balancing pond which was nearly half an acre. Equally another development locally got it wrong and built a concrete impound that was like an inland dock that had to be fenced off for the safety of the public.
As with all of our stock, I think the stuff makes a small contribution, but that the real issue is existing stock - just like energy reduction.
I believe Cambourne was the first major development with SuDS in mind - I think it was 'sold' as such.
It's interesting that many developments around here seem to have small ponds associated with them - for instance the new development in Hardwick (which is relatively small), or the ditches in the Roman Edge development in Godmanchester. They have a very different 'feel' to (say) Bar Hill, started twenty or thirty years before Cambourne.
@selebiab, thank you: I'll try and have a look sometime. Thanks for the sources. A brief skim and the media coverage supports my head canon that the law on trans will/has evolved in the same way as the law on gambling did in the 19/20th century, so I'll try to get an article out in a week or two. Will probably have to go backstage (what @MoonRabbit refers to as "the toilets") given the kerfuffle.
Apologies for misspelling your name. My fingers have got a head cold. 😀
I quite like it
Article sounds interesting - I hope you publish get it on the front page rather than the toilets, but please VM me if the latter.
Strictly, there are two main trans debates at the moment. The legal one - self ID, single sex spaces etc and then the one around interventions for children with gender dysphoria. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover - those more 'gender critical' are unlikely to support pharmaceutical interventions for gender in children, I expect and those very much on the affirmative size are probably itching to whip out their scalpels for penis/breast removal, but there's also a group that's fairly relaxed about the legal side but has reservations about puberty blockers etc.
Being a good centrist dad, I'm somewhere in the middle on both issues And being a good* scientist I want more evidence on both issues.
*preliminary finding - more research needed!
The toilets is more like "The Executive Washroom" - only the best are invited.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
I have only ever been to Blackpool once. I was staying in the genteel Inn at Whitewell during one of the COVID lockdown respites. I thought to myself I've never been to Blackpool let's give it a whirl, it's only half an hour away. My wife assured me I would regret this choice. My overarching memory of Scott Benton's Blackpool is that at approximately 11am I spied a drunk urinating on the pavement opposite the Tower ballroom. No furtive piddle against the bus stop wall. There he was, todger in hand spraying the litter and dog dirt with gay abandon.
It's only half an hour away and you have only been once?! Never been drawn to the Pleasure Beach (for my money, the best time you can have at a theme park anywhere in the country)? The zoo? The beaches? The Sandcastle (not everyone's cuo of tea, I grant you.) The murmurations of starlings around the North Pier? Hell, just a three mile walk down the prom at sunset is one of the best walks in Lancashire.
Sunak will be judged on the the nationwide test of the local and mayoral elections, Blackpool will be a footnote. As Blackpool would always have been a nailed on Conservative loss, I don't think it'll have the same impact as a loss in seats where they are defending a much larger majority.
What's noticeable here is the total lack of Reform candidates on the published candidate nominations. And Conservative councillors will mostly have built up a local reputation will mean that many are judged on their own merits and not against the car crash of this government. None of that applies in a general election of course.
So I can see the Conservatives significantly outperforming against expectations in the locals. Overall I think the May elections will overall throw Sunak a lifeline by virtue of the results being misinterpreted as if they were a general election, rather than being the catalyst for a leadership challenge.
In similar situations (by-election on same day as locals), the by-election has often led the news reporting. I don't think it will be a footnote. Although that does depend on the result: a more shocking result (huge swing, Reform UK 2nd, or Tories managing to hold, etc.) will get more coverage.
There's also the timings to consider. Presumably the Blackpool by-election result will be announced in the small hours of Friday morning. A lot of councils will take a while to collate their results and some don't count at all untill Friday daytime.
London isn't counting until Saturday... What are the other Mayoral areas doing?
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
Thhank-you for that - it's an interesting example which looks to be good, in that they use the sensible bits that will continue working themselves, but have avoided the complexities and gimmicks that were rather a feature of the New Labour / Gordon Brown period (eg rainwater harvesting for use inside the house, which requires an entirely separate grey water reuse system).
I'd slightly dispute your timing in that I think SUDs has been a basic for quite a lot longer than that.
One benefit that is not afaics identified is the 10s of 1000s of ponds and wet areas created by such systems. Any substantial development can have scores of these, and initiatives correctly bemoaning loss of village ponds have not afaics noticed these yet.
One smallish housing development I did (110 houses, 10 acres) required a balancing pond which was nearly half an acre. Equally another development locally got it wrong and built a concrete impound that was like an inland dock that had to be fenced off for the safety of the public.
As with all of our stock, I think the stuff makes a small contribution, but that the real issue is existing stock - just like energy reduction.
Concrete impound? Was this in the shittier part of Texas or something? WTF?
How many millennia have people been using clay and gravel to waterproof artificial ponds, now?
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Do you not also do Avebury from time to time, of interest to us sci fi geeks too.
I've not yet worked in Avebury, but might have to
I do sometimes walk there, along the ancient Herepath which crosses the Ridgeway
I’d be surprised if 1946-47 was a better harvest than this one is going to be and that’s ‘since the Second World War.’
But yes, it’s clearly going to be a terrible year for agriculture and it’s about the fifth in a row as well.
A proportion of winter cereal never got drilled - say 15% and a similar proportion has been so affected by waterlogging that it will barely be worth swlvaging. Combine that with late harvested crops like beet and potatoes which have rotted, or where harvested has caused tremendous damage to soil structure and there will definitely be reduced output and higher prices.
But agriculture has to work better with nature too. Some of the failed crops will be on fields that really shouldn’t be in arable. Too heavy, too low lying. The climate is changing and we need to adapt to it.
I'm assuming that one outcome of this will be "but farmers need more subsidies from the taxpayers."
I might be quite hopeful for this once we are after the election and have a Government (rather than a pack of headless chickens). I'd like to see more of an emphasis on Ukraine style field margins, especially in "prairie field faming" areas of the UK - which would increase land stability AND boost forest cover AND potentially boost harvests AND could be used to gain a far better solution for public access like Wales or hopefully Scotland.
Would Labour do it? I'm not sure, but our Public Footpaths' network is massively neglected. One straw in the wind is Rights' of Way teams being integrated into "Highways" in local authorities, as anything in Local Government continues to be slashed and burned from the centre.
The Conservatives can't ever do that, as they are joined at the hip to the landowner lobby, who always want to reduce public access in quantity and quality.
I've had quite detailed contact with the shadow Defra team under Steve Reed (who agreed to a half-day briefing by my charity) and have been impressed by their seriousness on this kind of issue. It's generally Rachel Reeves-friendly as the kind of change one can encourage without vast new expenditure. The LibDems and SNP have also responded positively, while the Conservatives have so far said "we'll get back to you" over several months, though we still hope they'll respond as it's really not a partisan thing.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
I have only ever been to Blackpool once. I was staying in the genteel Inn at Whitewell during one of the COVID lockdown respites. I thought to myself I've never been to Blackpool let's give it a whirl, it's only half an hour away. My wife assured me I would regret this choice. My overarching memory of Scott Benton's Blackpool is that at approximately 11am I spied a drunk urinating on the pavement opposite the Tower ballroom. No furtive piddle against the bus stop wall. There he was, todger in hand spraying the litter and dog dirt with gay abandon.
It's only half an hour away and you have only been once?! Never been drawn to the Pleasure Beach (for my money, the best time you can have at a theme park anywhere in the country)? The zoo? The beaches? The Sandcastle (not everyone's cuo of tea, I grant you.) The murmurations of starlings around the North Pier? Hell, just a three mile walk down the prom at sunset is one of the best walks in Lancashire.
No, no, just half an our away from my luxurious weekend hotel.
I’d be surprised if 1946-47 was a better harvest than this one is going to be and that’s ‘since the Second World War.’
But yes, it’s clearly going to be a terrible year for agriculture and it’s about the fifth in a row as well.
A proportion of winter cereal never got drilled - say 15% and a similar proportion has been so affected by waterlogging that it will barely be worth swlvaging. Combine that with late harvested crops like beet and potatoes which have rotted, or where harvested has caused tremendous damage to soil structure and there will definitely be reduced output and higher prices.
But agriculture has to work better with nature too. Some of the failed crops will be on fields that really shouldn’t be in arable. Too heavy, too low lying. The climate is changing and we need to adapt to it.
I'm assuming that one outcome of this will be "but farmers need more subsidies from the taxpayers."
I might be quite hopeful for this once we are after the election and have a Government (rather than a pack of headless chickens). I'd like to see more of an emphasis on Ukraine style field margins, especially in "prairie field faming" areas of the UK - which would increase land stability AND boost forest cover AND potentially boost harvests AND could be used to gain a far better solution for public access like Wales or hopefully Scotland.
Would Labour do it? I'm not sure, but our Public Footpaths' network is massively neglected. One straw in the wind is Rights' of Way teams being integrated into "Highways" in local authorities, as anything in Local Government continues to be slashed and burned from the centre.
The Conservatives can't ever do that, as they are joined at the hip to the landowner lobby, who always want to reduce public access in quantity and quality.
I've had quite detailed contact with the shadow Defra team under Steve Reed (who agreed to a half-day briefing by my charity) and have been impressed by their seriousness on this kind of issue. It's generally Rachel Reeves-friendly as the kind of change one can encourage without vast new expenditure. The LibDems and SNP have also responded positively, while the Conservatives have so far said "we'll get back to you" over several months, though we still hope they'll respond as it's really not a partisan thing.
TBF the Conservative Party is such a mess at the moment it's probably best if any response is delayed until a sane team is in place...
@selebiab, thank you: I'll try and have a look sometime. Thanks for the sources. A brief skim and the media coverage supports my head canon that the law on trans will/has evolved in the same way as the law on gambling did in the 19/20th century, so I'll try to get an article out in a week or two. Will probably have to go backstage (what @MoonRabbit refers to as "the toilets") given the kerfuffle.
Apologies for misspelling your name. My fingers have got a head cold. 😀
I quite like it
Article sounds interesting - I hope you publish get it on the front page rather than the toilets, but please VM me if the latter.
Strictly, there are two main trans debates at the moment. The legal one - self ID, single sex spaces etc and then the one around interventions for children with gender dysphoria. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover - those more 'gender critical' are unlikely to support pharmaceutical interventions for gender in children, I expect and those very much on the affirmative size are probably itching to whip out their scalpels for penis/breast removal, but there's also a group that's fairly relaxed about the legal side but has reservations about puberty blockers etc.
Being a good centrist dad, I'm somewhere in the middle on both issues And being a good* scientist I want more evidence on both issues.
*preliminary finding - more research needed!
The toilets is more like "The Executive Washroom" - only the best are invited.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
I'm enjoying your contributions today Rochdale. I'm not 100% convinced what you propose is the answer - but I am convinced it's worth trying. It (and indeed your posts about Stockton) tie in with some loose thoughts I'm half-trying to weave together into a theme about the role of the state in making places and beauty in the urban environment. Not sure yet what I'm concluding so your musings on this theme are very helpful!
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
Though you get issues with rainwater run off going straight into streams/rivers. It does often need treatment of its own.
I think the documents i linked goes into that a little.
Yup - It's just I'm always slightly surprised at the enviro types who claim that separating the flows is a free lunch. Wanted to put that up in the debate here, since quite a few people don't seem to read the links.
A big part is making the storage as local as possible. A rainwater barrel fed from the guttering on a house/block of flats is ridiculously cheap and needs little maintenance.
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Blackpool was almost 70% Leave and if Reform can't win a by election there where can they win?
In the local elections though yes Reform have put up far less candidates than the Tories so their impact is likely to be a damp squib
So the Tory results will be flattered in the locals, by Reform voters voting Tory for lack of Reform candidates? According to your theory that Reform voters are just itching to get back in the Tory "fold"?
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Over the centuries the small town where I now live (not where I’m from) has reinvented itself several times. The shifts took quite a while, though.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
The bit in bold feels important- we find a bit of mess and jumble appealing. The Metroland knock-off where I live works in part because it's had a century or so for the initial cookie cutter development to have a hundred different tweaks.
(Sounds like the sort of thing that Create Streets would say, and I think they're right about most stuff.)
Is that maybe why the King Charles stuff- Poundbury and whatnot- is a bit too uncanny valley? It's too tidy and the rules seem set to keep it that way?
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
Blackpool was almost 70% Leave and if Reform can't win a by election there where can they win?
In the local elections though yes Reform have put up far less candidates than the Tories so their impact is likely to be a damp squib
So the Tory results will be flattered in the locals, by Reform voters voting Tory for lack of Reform candidates? According to your theory that Reform voters are just itching to get back in the Tory "fold"?
More likely they just won't vote at all. Especially for local elections where turnout is often meh at the best of times. That would push everyone else's share up, but leave the gap roughly as it is.
Sunak will be judged on the the nationwide test of the local and mayoral elections, Blackpool will be a footnote. As Blackpool would always have been a nailed on Conservative loss, I don't think it'll have the same impact as a loss in seats where they are defending a much larger majority.
What's noticeable here is the total lack of Reform candidates on the published candidate nominations. And Conservative councillors will mostly have built up a local reputation will mean that many are judged on their own merits and not against the car crash of this government. None of that applies in a general election of course.
So I can see the Conservatives significantly outperforming against expectations in the locals. Overall I think the May elections will overall throw Sunak a lifeline by virtue of the results being misinterpreted as if they were a general election, rather than being the catalyst for a leadership challenge.
In similar situations (by-election on same day as locals), the by-election has often led the news reporting. I don't think it will be a footnote. Although that does depend on the result: a more shocking result (huge swing, Reform UK 2nd, or Tories managing to hold, etc.) will get more coverage.
There's also the timings to consider. Presumably the Blackpool by-election result will be announced in the small hours of Friday morning. A lot of councils will take a while to collate their results and some don't count at all untill Friday daytime.
London isn't counting until Saturday... What are the other Mayoral areas doing?
Here in the Black Country the locals will be announced late on Friday morning and the Mayoral election on Saturday. Some councils still count local results overnight on Thursday/Friday though.
Normally you would have a point in that the early results will influence the overall narrative and public perception. However, in the case of challenges to Sunak it's not the initial public perception that counts but how Conservative MPs interpret the results, because they are the ones with the ability to move against Sunak. In that regard the timing of the announcements is irrelevant - clearly nothing is going to happen until after the weekend, when all the results are in. I would expect Conservative MPs to be influenced by the nationwide picture and also the local election results in their own patch.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
He sounds a complete steamer. But as far as adaption to climate change is concerned, he was worse than useless.
(Wikipedia) ..Despite his voting record "moderately for" laws to stop climate change, he is a climate change sceptic, and did not accept scientist David MacKay's offer of a briefing on climate change science.[25] Prior to being appointed at DEFRA, he described wind turbines as "ridiculous" and "useless" and called for the end of "Soviet" subsidies that supported their development. As an alternative to wind power, he supported the use of fracking. At the 2013 Conservative party conference, he argued that there were advantages to climate change such as fewer deaths caused by cold weather and the ability to grow food further North. During his time in office, Paterson cut funding for climate change adaptation by approximately 40%. In 2014, the outgoing Environment Agency chair Chris Smith said that flood defence budget cuts had left the agency underfunded and hampered its ability to prevent and respond to flooding in the UK. When asked in a 2013 BBC interview about the alleged failure of a badger cull he had been responsible for, Paterson replied that "the badgers have moved the goalposts."..
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
The bit in bold feels important- we find a bit of mess and jumble appealing. The Metroland knock-off where I live works in part because it's had a century or so for the initial cookie cutter development to have a hundred different tweaks.
(Sounds like the sort of thing that Create Streets would say, and I think they're right about most stuff.)
Is that maybe why the King Charles stuff- Poundbury and whatnot- is a bit too uncanny valley? It's too tidy and the rules seem set to keep it that way?
Poundbury et al are attempting to fake up a slightly jumbled look and feel. The mention of the uncanny value is very acute - this effect is seen where things are close, but not quite right.
It's not so much the rules and tidiness, as the fact that some bits just don't make sense.
The layers of order and disorder in such urban structures brings me back to non-linearity in nearly everything in nature. Hence it fits with humans better.
To me, this seems a very plausible election result.
Reform getting 13% is not to my mind a remotely plausible election result. Nor Tories getting 24%.
LLG getting 57% and RefCon 37% is, however, very plausible.
I think polling this far out is more likely to be wrong than right, but I think if people are saying they’ll vote Reform or whatever, then it has to be plausible that they will.
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
The bit in bold feels important- we find a bit of mess and jumble appealing. The Metroland knock-off where I live works in part because it's had a century or so for the initial cookie cutter development to have a hundred different tweaks.
(Sounds like the sort of thing that Create Streets would say, and I think they're right about most stuff.)
Is that maybe why the King Charles stuff- Poundbury and whatnot- is a bit too uncanny valley? It's too tidy and the rules seem set to keep it that way?
We have some friends (*) visit; he is a rocket scientist, and she is a German architect. He did not like the different look of the buildings and called it a pastiche (which, to be fair, it is). She liked it; said it gave interest and character.
I thought it interesting that two intelligent people can see the same street and have such different views. Personally, I love the variety. Particularly when two adjoining houses, built at the same time, have slightly different roof pitch angles, making it look as though they were built at different times by different people. I do think the blocked-up faux windows are a bit naff though...
Incidentally, when talking about the 'old' woodlands in our town; the town was planned around them and the lakes in the low ground. As an example, one of the main through roads in the village takes a big looping bend around one of the areas of woodland (which I think carried a bridleway, and still does).
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
Aren't their systems in place for medical treatments that are still experimental - so that reporting data is mandatory?
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
Are you an expert on being an expert, though?
No
Although occasionally in the past I've talked to 'experts' in something and felt like they're b/s merchants as I was fairly sure some of the stuff they were spouting was wrong.
I see this more in the media. It's almost as though someone keeps experts in hutches, ready to be sold to the media....
Instead of setting out to the public why Britain needs to spend more on defence, and winning public support for Britain to do so, and then sort out the MoD, Sunak is encouraging complacency by concentrating on criticising other NATO countries. How is that going to help?
Other countries may be doing worse (disclaimer: including my country of residence), but that doesn't give Sunak and Britain a pass on whether they're doing enough to ensure Britain's safety and to prevent the world becoming increasingly dominated by authoritarian dictatorships.
I was briefly in clacton last year after a camping trip in Essex. What a deplorably run down place it was. Drug dealers on the streets. People in dirty worn down clothes. People had hard lives etched in their faces.
When I listen to people like in this video, it hammers home to me that there are several kinds of poverty: lack of money, lack of network, lack of information and knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of power and voice. They seem decoupled from any participation in the collective project that is our country.
And behind that are locations that have no overall economic function or connection with the broader national and global economy - they don't participate in the structural circulation of money, goods, people, ideas that is necessary for them to be viable. These locations are literal dead ends.
The citizens talk about being a holiday town. They were killed off by easy jet and Ryan Air and being a holiday town won't ever properly recover. Those times are gone. Why would you go to blackpool or clacton if you can be in Malaga for £80 return?
They talk about fixing the buildings.... to what end? The buildings need a role to play in the town, which itself needs a role in a broader economy. There needs to be a total rethink about the purpose of these towns... because it isn't tourism. Not till these seaside towns are integrated into the broader economic circulation of the nation will we begin to address these issues. Saying it is an issue of individual tax cuts or individual moral fortitude totally misses the point of what is going on in my mind.
Yep. The seaside towns are the mining towns of this century. And just like those they'll probably go one of two ways. Either they are connected to a major economic engine, and will gradually prosper due to attracting a younger, hip crowd because of relatively cheap housing and good transport connectivity, or they'll become locked in pointless intergenerational decline. Whitley Bay, Southport, Brighton are the former at differing stages. Clacton and Blackpool the latter.
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
Aren't their systems in place for medical treatments that are still experimental - so that reporting data is mandatory?
Not universally. Where they exist, generally some clinicians with research interest set them up.
Also, define 'experimental' There are plenty of off-label (as they haven't been tested extensively in children) applications of medicines in the population I am interested in (not youth with gender dysphoria!) and no real means of assessing outcomes.
Comments
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
Last time I was down there, visiting a company on the outskirts, I was amazed at quite how much housebuilding was going on. This was about three years ago. It did seem to have a rather vibrant feel to it. Mind you so did Hartlepool with all the housebuilding along the A690 corridor.
Blackpool’s brand seems to me still valuable enough for its future to be tourism and fun. Whereas Clacton, no. Clacton given its location is surely best placed simply as a pleasantly leafed-up retirement town, so maybe what it really needs is some civic beautification and a bit of Britain in Bloom.
Then there are places like Skegness: little tourism anymore, no rich urban hinterland, not a big retirement draw unlike the South Coast. What to do? I’d say industrialise. Tax free zone up to Teesside, get the factories in.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/geology-projects/suds/
https://www.susdrain.org/case-studies/pdfs/lamb_drove_residential_suds_scheme_cambourne.pdf
I might be quite hopeful for this once we are after the election and have a Government (rather than a pack of headless chickens). I'd like to see more of an emphasis on Ukraine style field margins, especially in "prairie field faming" areas of the UK - which would increase land stability AND boost forest cover AND potentially boost harvests AND could be used to gain a far better solution for public access like Wales or hopefully Scotland.
Would Labour do it? I'm not sure, but our Public Footpaths' network is massively neglected. One straw in the wind is Rights' of Way teams being integrated into "Highways" in local authorities, as anything in Local Government continues to be slashed and burned from the centre.
The Conservatives can't ever do that, as they are joined at the hip to the landowner lobby, who always want to reduce public access in quantity and quality.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
1 Council needs to build government approved numbers of new homes
2 Council approves developer planning applications
3 Developer doesn't build them
4 Council found in breach of its local plan which means
5 Developer can build what and where they like without restriction
So many of the houses being built in these places are not what these places need - affordable homes. With actual planning so that there are roads and schools and doctors and shops. Stockton has been hit by developers doing what they like and its causing gridlock. Same in eastern Rochdale.
On your terms you should be outraged at Casino's attack on Rayner for liking the opera.
In general news coverage magnifies the total significance of small groups, just as you would never know from the media that homicide in this country is very very rare.
BTW growing a tree through then roof of the house is a precondition of staging an amateur performance of Die Walkure in your street.
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
No sun here, sadly. Off soon for my weekly stint at Citizens Advice - trying to help some people from Dura's 'parallel nation'.
Town centres apart but town centres have been struggling since the arrival of out of town supermarkets and then the internet.
However those mining areas are located in the middle of the country, with motorways running through them and with major cities nearby.
The parts of the country which are really struggling are coastal and usually with poor communications.
While some other coastal areas suffer from the opposite effect of too much outside money driving out the locals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Wiltshire_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
And the same is true for our cities; and even individual streets, as I think Douglas Adams pointed out. 'Poor' and 'rich' areas can exist in very close proximity.
As for trees growing out of derelict shops: yes, that happens. But that's also always happened, and should probably happen forever if we want healthy settlements. Things get older and need rebuilding or repurposing. Whilst we wait for that to happen, it looks sh*t. That's been the case of the Becketwell Lane area of Derby, for instance, which had a very poor sixties shopping arcade that was slowly abandoned and became an eyesore. It is now being redeveloped and repurposed.
https://www.derby.gov.uk/news/2021/november/becketwell-development-well-underway/
I'd slightly dispute your timing in that I think SUDs has been a basic for quite a lot longer than that.
One benefit that is not afaics identified is the 10s of 1000s of ponds and wet areas created by such systems. Any substantial development can have scores of these, and initiatives correctly bemoaning loss of village ponds have not afaics noticed these yet.
One smallish housing development I did (110 houses, 10 acres) required a balancing pond which was nearly half an acre. Equally another development locally got it wrong and built a concrete impound that was like an inland dock that had to be fenced off for the safety of the public.
As with all of our stock, I think the stuff makes a small contribution, but that the real issue is existing stock - just like energy reduction.
In the local elections though yes Reform have put up far less candidates than the Tories so their impact is likely to be a damp squib
Article sounds interesting - I hope you publish get it on the front page rather than the toilets, but please VM me if the latter.
Strictly, there are two main trans debates at the moment. The legal one - self ID, single sex spaces etc and then the one around interventions for children with gender dysphoria. I'm sure there's a lot of crossover - those more 'gender critical' are unlikely to support pharmaceutical interventions for gender in children, I expect and those very much on the affirmative size are probably itching to whip out their scalpels for penis/breast removal, but there's also a group that's fairly relaxed about the legal side but has reservations about puberty blockers etc.
Being a good centrist dad, I'm somewhere in the middle on both issues
*preliminary finding - more research needed!
The Lib Dem candidate, David Kinnaird, has done a good job of getting himself known in town and seems rather popular
He might be worth a few quid as I expect Kruger's (notional) majority and name recognition will likely see him as a strong favourite in the betting
It's interesting that many developments around here seem to have small ponds associated with them - for instance the new development in Hardwick (which is relatively small), or the ditches in the Roman Edge development in Godmanchester. They have a very different 'feel' to (say) Bar Hill, started twenty or thirty years before Cambourne.
London isn't counting until Saturday... What are the other Mayoral areas doing?
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
How many millennia have people been using clay and gravel to waterproof artificial ponds, now?
I do sometimes walk there, along the ancient Herepath which crosses the Ridgeway
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
If I lived near Blackpool, I would move.
A big part is making the storage as local as possible. A rainwater barrel fed from the guttering on a house/block of flats is ridiculously cheap and needs little maintenance.
*Labour leads by 18 points*
Labour: 42%
Conservatives: 24%
Reform UK: 13%
Lib Dems: 10%
Green: 5%
Other: 6%
https://x.com/JLPartnersPolls/status/1777964913018720720
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
According to your theory that Reform voters are just itching to get back in the Tory "fold"?
LLG getting 57% and RefCon 37% is, however, very plausible.
The shifts took quite a while, though.
I had to hand about a hundred of them to people because they were standing by their door, or I had a parcel for them
About sixty of those people noticed the leaflet and made a face
I said to all of those people "For your dart board", every one of them laughed
That's a scientific poll
Labour: 33% (+1 from Oct)
SNP: 31% (-2)
Con: 14% (-6)
Lib Dem: 7% (+2)
Reform UK: 7% (+5)
Green: 5% (=)
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1777979565241139327
(Sounds like the sort of thing that Create Streets would say, and I think they're right about most stuff.)
Is that maybe why the King Charles stuff- Poundbury and whatnot- is a bit too uncanny valley? It's too tidy and the rules seem set to keep it that way?
But I don't think that means Kruger will get 20%
I probably need to do a Kinnaird leaflet and compare reactions
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
Normally you would have a point in that the early results will influence the overall narrative and public perception. However, in the case of challenges to Sunak it's not the initial public perception that counts but how Conservative MPs interpret the results, because they are the ones with the ability to move against Sunak. In that regard the timing of the announcements is irrelevant - clearly nothing is going to happen until after the weekend, when all the results are in. I would expect Conservative MPs to be influenced by the nationwide picture and also the local election results in their own patch.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
But as far as adaption to climate change is concerned, he was worse than useless.
(Wikipedia)
..Despite his voting record "moderately for" laws to stop climate change, he is a climate change sceptic, and did not accept scientist David MacKay's offer of a briefing on climate change science.[25] Prior to being appointed at DEFRA, he described wind turbines as "ridiculous" and "useless" and called for the end of "Soviet" subsidies that supported their development. As an alternative to wind power, he supported the use of fracking. At the 2013 Conservative party conference, he argued that there were advantages to climate change such as fewer deaths caused by cold weather and the ability to grow food further North. During his time in office, Paterson cut funding for climate change adaptation by approximately 40%. In 2014, the outgoing Environment Agency chair Chris Smith said that flood defence budget cuts had left the agency underfunded and hampered its ability to prevent and respond to flooding in the UK. When asked in a 2013 BBC interview about the alleged failure of a badger cull he had been responsible for, Paterson replied that "the badgers have moved the goalposts."..
It's not so much the rules and tidiness, as the fact that some bits just don't make sense.
The layers of order and disorder in such urban structures brings me back to non-linearity in nearly everything in nature. Hence it fits with humans better.
I thought it interesting that two intelligent people can see the same street and have such different views. Personally, I love the variety. Particularly when two adjoining houses, built at the same time, have slightly different roof pitch angles, making it look as though they were built at different times by different people. I do think the blocked-up faux windows are a bit naff though...
Incidentally, when talking about the 'old' woodlands in our town; the town was planned around them and the lakes in the low ground. As an example, one of the main through roads in the village takes a big looping bend around one of the areas of woodland (which I think carried a bridleway, and still does).
(*) Yes, I know this is unbelievable.
Although occasionally in the past I've talked to 'experts' in something and felt like they're b/s merchants as I was fairly sure some of the stuff they were spouting was wrong.
I see this more in the media. It's almost as though someone keeps experts in hutches, ready to be sold to the media....
Other countries may be doing worse (disclaimer: including my country of residence), but that doesn't give Sunak and Britain a pass on whether they're doing enough to ensure Britain's safety and to prevent the world becoming increasingly dominated by authoritarian dictatorships.
It's extremely poor.
And just like those they'll probably go one of two ways.
Either they are connected to a major economic engine, and will gradually prosper due to attracting a younger, hip crowd because of relatively cheap housing and good transport connectivity, or they'll become locked in pointless intergenerational decline.
Whitley Bay, Southport, Brighton are the former at differing stages.
Clacton and Blackpool the latter.
Also, define 'experimental'