I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Nearly all the real bias in the BBC (an outfit I am massively in support of, which is why criticising it is important) is done by story selection rather than interior bias within the story itself.
It is, for example, easy to imagine a BBC story centring on particular ethnic minorities being disproportionately the victims of something (from university admissions, to healthcare to crime). Almost impossible to imagine the same focus on particular ethnic minorities as the perpetrators of something.
This is no different from the Daily Mail of course (mutatis mutandis) or the Guardian, but the BBC is, or should be, different.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man isn't. A criminal with no legal right to be in the UK being deported is what's meant to happen, but it doesn't constitute news.
That's true, but it does give people a distorted view of reality, and helps to feed into the idea that nothing works, which while arguably more true than it used to be, is somewhat exaggerated.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
But it was decaf -so not good coffee, just brown water.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
There is nothing so common, in history, as ideologues of politics or religion going after their fellows. "Must purify the Revolution/Church, first."
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Which line? It might be wanted for reinstatement as a rail link?
Powderhall.
Thanks. The remnant branch line from the main line at Piershill to the [edit] closed cooncil rubbish compaction depot where the greyhound stadium used to be. Not obviously in demand, esp as they have the south side railway as a diversion route thro' central Edin.
My example of these is a multiuser trail (Blackwell Trail) from my town that stops half a mile short of Alfreton (East Midlands Mainline to London) Station, and either way in by cycle is hilly and dangerous. There is a track alongside the line, which could be used to access the station along the valley.
No lift at the station - wheelchairs going from Platform 1 to Platform 2 go to Nottingham and back (90 minutes) to use their lift. No secure cycle parking (no need - it's quite dangerous to cycle there so no one can go).
The issue is that Railtrack and the transport industry don't give a damn, and won't until forced. It look a Supreme Court action by an individual to even get accessibility law applied to Rail Replacement Services.
It needs a new enforced statutory duty on Railtrack or whatever replaces it.
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
People who drink decaf coffee don't have a right to live in the same moral universe as the rest of us or comment on its failings?
Spend a few minutes in silent reflection on what happens to the millions and millions of tons of unsold perishables on shelves and warehouses worldwide annually.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Which line? It might be wanted for reinstatement as a rail link?
Powderhall.
Thanks. The remnant branch line from the main line at Piershill to the [edit] closed cooncil rubbish compaction depot where the greyhound stadium used to be. Not obviously in demand, esp as they have the south side railway as a diversion route thro' central Edin.
My example of these is a multiuser trail (Blackwell Trail) from my town that stops half a mile short of Alfreton (East Midlands Mainline to London) Station, and either way in by cycle is hilly and dangerous. There is a track alongside the line, which could be used to access the station along the valley.
No lift at the station - wheelchairs going from Platform 1 to Platform 2 go to Nottingham and back (90 minutes) to use their lift. No secure cycle parking (no need - it's quite dangerous to cycle there so no one can go).
The issue is that Railtrack and the transport industry don't give a damn. It look a Supreme Court action by an individual to even get accessibility law applied to Rail Replacement Services.
It needs a new statutory duty on Railtrack or whatever replaces it.
The politics of immigration has caused the opinion poll lead of the main opposition party to evaporate ahead of Parliamentary elections expected within less than twelve months.
Unfortunately for Sunak this is in Ireland rather than Britain, but Sinn Fein's travails may be an inspiration for him.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man isn't. A criminal with no legal right to be in the UK being deported is what's meant to happen, but it doesn't constitute news.
That's true, but it does give people a distorted view of reality, and helps to feed into the idea that nothing works, which while arguably more true than it used to be, is somewhat exaggerated.
Yes, it does. The public are demonstrably ill-informed about many aspects of public policy. For example, the public think immigration is higher than it is, that crime is higher than it is, that crime by immigrants is higher than it is. People, even here, are convinced that student visas are overwhelmingly being perverted, yet we've just had a government report, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6641e1fbbd01f5ed32793992/MAC+Rapid+Review+of+Graduate+Route.pdf , saying the graduate route works well and is not being abused.
But what do you do? News is, definitionally, stuff that is out of the ordinary. The one case not working is news. The thousands of cases that do work aren't. Generally speaking, I think the BBC do do better than most media sources at covering the background stuff, doing the analysis, giving some context. Something like Radio 4's More or Less does this well.
Covering the cases that work, not just the ones that don't, is commercially difficult, so it's the sort of work that requires a Reithian model of public funding.
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steal production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Or the direct production of industrial feedstocks like ammonia - so eliminating the storage problem completely.
The politics of immigration has caused the opinion poll lead of the main opposition party to evaporate ahead of Parliamentary elections expected within less than twelve months.
Unfortunately for Sunak this is in Ireland rather than Britain, but Sinn Fein's travails may be an inspiration for him.
Those who think the next UK GE is done and dusted are wrong.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
Person deranged enough to turn to assassination as a solution is "not entirely logical" and "has taken minor political differences way out of proportion" says internet commentator.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
People who shoot people aren't always the finest at reasoning.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
Did you even think to ask what they did with the caffeine ?
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
But it was decaf -so not good coffee, just brown water.
How very dare you. Cafe Nero is the best of the lot I don't mind SBUX either.
My preferred tipple is Algerian Coffee Stores Swiss Water Processed decaf (high roast) which is very nice indeed.
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Which line? It might be wanted for reinstatement as a rail link?
Powderhall.
Thanks. The remnant branch line from the main line at Piershill to the [edit] closed cooncil rubbish compaction depot where the greyhound stadium used to be. Not obviously in demand, esp as they have the south side railway as a diversion route thro' central Edin.
My example of these is a multiuser trail (Blackwell Trail) from my town that stops half a mile short of Alfreton (East Midlands Mainline to London) Station, and either way in by cycle is hilly and dangerous. There is a track alongside the line, which could be used to access the station along the valley.
No lift at the station - wheelchairs going from Platform 1 to Platform 2 go to Nottingham and back (90 minutes) to use their lift. No secure cycle parking (no need - it's quite dangerous to cycle there so no one can go).
The issue is that Railtrack and the transport industry don't give a damn. It look a Supreme Court action by an individual to even get accessibility law applied to Rail Replacement Services.
It needs a new statutory duty on Railtrack or whatever replaces it.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Which line? It might be wanted for reinstatement as a rail link?
Powderhall.
Thanks. The remnant branch line from the main line at Piershill to the [edit] closed cooncil rubbish compaction depot where the greyhound stadium used to be. Not obviously in demand, esp as they have the south side railway as a diversion route thro' central Edin.
My example of these is a multiuser trail (Blackwell Trail) from my town that stops half a mile short of Alfreton (East Midlands Mainline to London) Station, and either way in by cycle is hilly and dangerous. There is a track alongside the line, which could be used to access the station along the valley.
No lift at the station - wheelchairs going from Platform 1 to Platform 2 go to Nottingham and back (90 minutes) to use their lift. No secure cycle parking (no need - it's quite dangerous to cycle there so no one can go).
The issue is that Railtrack and the transport industry don't give a damn. It look a Supreme Court action by an individual to even get accessibility law applied to Rail Replacement Services.
It needs a new statutory duty on Railtrack or whatever replaces it.
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
Did you even think to ask what they did with the caffeine ?
I did ask what proportion of coffee they sold was decaf and they declined to answer.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
Also, just ask the PO. Theyu know all about making estimates of fraud before siccing new computers on it.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
Blame Boris Johnson. His administration set it up.
Mmm, who could have foreseen that an enormous troupe of barristers, travelling around the country for a couple of years would have turned out to be expensive?
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
There are plenty of tech literate lawyers. The issue is that the legal system is not (despite some protestations to the contrary) exclusively designed for lawyers or, indeed, the tech literate.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
So, do I have this right? The person who shot Robert Fico appears to have been politically motivated, and is pro-Russian and anti-immigration. Fico is also pro-Russian and anti-immigration, but the shooter is further to the right, whereas Fico is a left-wing populist...?
Think so. Also allegedly an activist against violence (of those early reports were true).
Blame Boris Johnson. His administration set it up.
Mmm, who could have foreseen that an enormous troupe of barristers, travelling around the country for a couple of years would have turned out to be expensive?
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
There are plenty of tech literate lawyers. The issue is that the legal system is not (despite some protestations to the contrary) exclusively designed for lawyers or, indeed, the tech literate.
Changing things would reduce the number of hours that lawyers would have to spend on doing the work.....
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
Estimating fraud levels is obviously an uncertain business, which provides quite a bit of scope for people to suspect that the estimates are being underdone.
What I would say is that, with so much of the application process now moved online, there's the potential that more fraud is now perpetrated by a smaller number of people.
In the past you might have had more fraud of the type where people were claiming benefits while doing cash in hand work, or lying about one eligibility criterion or another. Nowadays it's more likely to involve a group who have harvested personal data, and making a large number of fraudulent claims.
Must be due a Sunak relaunch. It's been a couple of days now.
'Relaunch' is one of the strangest words. It both implies an earlier failure, and in almost every case is in fact the harbinger and herald of future failure too. Like:
"Political Betting relaunches as a website dedicated to betting about politics which is never diverted from its central and core activity".
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
Edit: I see this question's already been answered, thanks.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
A few of the cycle paths I use are former railway tracks that were used for moving coal around before the mines shut. Nature has reclaimed them and Sustrans puts in some interesting art features along the way.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
One excellent policy was, in London, of granting planning permission more easily, subject to adding a piece of riverside pathway. In times past, many building were built right up to the edge of the river (warehouses). So this meant that if the property was being redeveloped, adding a piece of riverside public path was in the interests of the developer.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
Blame Boris Johnson. His administration set it up.
Mmm, who could have foreseen that an enormous troupe of barristers, travelling around the country for a couple of years would have turned out to be expensive?
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
Hardly surprising, given the precedent (or lack of) at Westminster. Voting like sheep being herded into pens for dipping with insecticide, not enough seats for MPs, ...
got to keep teh gravy train flowing Carnyx, the chums need the big bucks
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
My favourite lost cause old line is the one, closed to passengers in 1920 (the Solway Junction line), running right through a social housing estate in Annan. More or less undisturbed for nearly 100 years. Dropped in recently to see how it was getting on.
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
Estimating fraud levels is obviously an uncertain business, which provides quite a bit of scope for people to suspect that the estimates are being underdone.
What I would say is that, with so much of the application process now moved online, there's the potential that more fraud is now perpetrated by a smaller number of people.
In the past you might have had more fraud of the type where people were claiming benefits while doing cash in hand work, or lying about one eligibility criterion or another. Nowadays it's more likely to involve a group who have harvested personal data, and making a large number of fraudulent claims.
I would imagine that there is quite a bit of people working "legit" up to the limits, then going "on the black" to top up earnings further.
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
People who drink decaf coffee don't have a right to live in the same moral universe as the rest of us or comment on its failings?
Spend a few minutes in silent reflection on what happens to the millions and millions of tons of unsold perishables on shelves and warehouses worldwide annually.
Although the bit of coffee that is so good for the liver isn't the caffeine , so for fending off the consequences of Leon-level overindulgence, decaf is just as good
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
Given a need, LHAs are quite capable of using all their road building powers to create other types of public highways. One problem is that they were created to build roads, so that is all they are designed to do.
So they need to be redesigned to be more useful, and joined up. Some things need redesigning from the ground up.
An example is the new cycleway / footpath built between Lewes and Polegate the other side of the hedge from the A27. Built in quite a short time, using appropriate powers. AIUI the driver was not "let's improve walking and cycling"; it was "there are too many bloody cyclists on our narrow road". I picked that up from Laura Laker iirc.
What happens now for people walking and cycling is that there is this decent quality bit of infra, and you suddenly fall off the edge of the world at the end of it.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
Yes I'd agree. They will attract some of those who've had enough of 'the English 4' who will be the ones who actually X them at the GE. Any ToryFormers are much more likely to drift back, especially when locally in most places they see and hear nothing from Tice and Co.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
My favourite lost cause old line is the one, closed to passengers in 1920 (the Solway Junction line), running right through a social housing estate in Annan. More or less undisturbed for nearly 100 years. Dropped in recently to see how it was getting on.
Was the estate there in 1920? The line was very useful for walking to the pub in England of a Sunday, in the old days.
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
People who drink decaf coffee don't have a right to live in the same moral universe as the rest of us or comment on its failings?
Spend a few minutes in silent reflection on what happens to the millions and millions of tons of unsold perishables on shelves and warehouses worldwide annually.
Although the bit of coffee that is so good for the liver isn't the caffeine , so for fending off the consequences of Leon-level overindulgence, decaf is just as good
But "In addition, research suggests that caffeine causes increased turnover of several feel-good neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline — all of which are involved in depression. These effects may also help explain why caffeine acts as a mild antidepressant for many people
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
Edit: I see this question's already been answered, thanks.
The track is still there, at least on Google air. I'm in two minds about its conversion. It used ot be a very useful branch line taking rubbish out to the cement works at Dunbar for incineration. Still potential for industrial purposes as it runs through a very mixed area with quite a bit of industry though admittedly not as much as there used to be.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
My favourite lost cause old line is the one, closed to passengers in 1920 (the Solway Junction line), running right through a social housing estate in Annan. More or less undisturbed for nearly 100 years. Dropped in recently to see how it was getting on.
Was the estate there in 1920? The line was very useful for walking to the pub in England of a Sunday, in the old days.
From its appearance, not. I once knew an elderly lady, now of course long dead though she lived to 101, who went to school from the English side over the rickety bridge to Annan every day until the line closed in 1920.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
While maybe not as egregious as the post office or blood contamination scandal I am here to report a brewing new outrage.
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
People who drink decaf coffee don't have a right to live in the same moral universe as the rest of us or comment on its failings?
Spend a few minutes in silent reflection on what happens to the millions and millions of tons of unsold perishables on shelves and warehouses worldwide annually.
Although the bit of coffee that is so good for the liver isn't the caffeine , so for fending off the consequences of Leon-level overindulgence, decaf is just as good
But "In addition, research suggests that caffeine causes increased turnover of several feel-good neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline — all of which are involved in depression. These effects may also help explain why caffeine acts as a mild antidepressant for many people
(Psych Central website)
I'm sure it does and the good news is that you would be awake to appreciate the feel good hit at 3am in the morning.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Think this might be the end of the road for politicians pledges. If they raise more questions than they answer, and no-one thinks they account to much, even if they believed them, maybe it's time to bin them.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
Very much the problem Labour will (and have in the locals) have in turning 'I'm not happy' into the large opinion poll %s. I see Labour getting high 30s in the GE maybe 40
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
One excellent policy was, in London, of granting planning permission more easily, subject to adding a piece of riverside pathway. In times past, many building were built right up to the edge of the river (warehouses). So this meant that if the property was being redeveloped, adding a piece of riverside public path was in the interests of the developer.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
That gets issues around being wasteful if you do not have continuity of vision in the organisation behind the initiative, or if Central Govt castrates the Councils for political reasons as has I think happened in both England and Scotland in 2010-2020.
When I did a housing estate opening a new area of land behind a ribbon-development main road (in 2013), a Planning Condition was to create 200m of wider 2.5m shared pavement along a section of the footway. Fine ... we took the hit on the land value, of perhaps £40-50k (working from perhaps 50% of standard build costs for the footway as it was an improvement).
There are now Planning Permissions 2 further medium sized (~100 unit) developments of housing there, and the same condition has *not* been applied in either case.
So we have 200m of half-decent cycleway/footway, floating there with nothing either end.
This is one reason why it is such a difficult process.
Developers salami-slicing quality to the legally allowed absolute minimum is another huge problem, as we have discussed, as is a similar approach from Councils wrt walking and cycling infra. The stuff being built around M1 junctions in the late 1960s is generally better than what we are getting now; you can still go out and find it.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
Very much the problem Labour will (and have in the locals) have in turning 'I'm not happy' into the large opinion poll %s. I see Labour getting high 30s in the GE maybe 40
Except that Labour's relative under performance in the locals is normal when they are high in the national polls, as we saw in 1996 and 1997. There seems to be a point where high national VI doesn't translate into more votes for Labour councillors.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Think this might be the end of the road for politicians pledges. If they raise more questions than they answer, and no-one thinks they account to much, even if they believed them, maybe it's time to bin them.
But aren't the questions entirely centred around their lack of ambition, rather than their believability?
Branding them as "Labour's First Steps..." is a pretty clear acknowledgement of that, so you have to imagine that this is a deliberate safety-first strategy from SKS.
As pledges go, these ones are at least rather more tangible than those chiselled onto the EdStone!
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
I phrased it as "6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories", not Reform UK get 6% in total. Now, I don't know what will happen. If it's Reform 6% in total, then, sure, that will have less impact.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
Very much the problem Labour will (and have in the locals) have in turning 'I'm not happy' into the large opinion poll %s. I see Labour getting high 30s in the GE maybe 40
Except that Labour's relative under performance in the locals is normal when they are high in the national polls, as we saw in 1996 and 1997. There seems to be a point where high national VI doesn't translate into more votes for Labour councillors.
Their 1996 local election performance matched their 1997 GE performance, both underperforming their VI
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
Estimating fraud levels is obviously an uncertain business, which provides quite a bit of scope for people to suspect that the estimates are being underdone.
What I would say is that, with so much of the application process now moved online, there's the potential that more fraud is now perpetrated by a smaller number of people.
In the past you might have had more fraud of the type where people were claiming benefits while doing cash in hand work, or lying about one eligibility criterion or another. Nowadays it's more likely to involve a group who have harvested personal data, and making a large number of fraudulent claims.
Organised, large-scale benefit fraud was a thing in the past too. The IRA were big into it.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
Very much the problem Labour will (and have in the locals) have in turning 'I'm not happy' into the large opinion poll %s. I see Labour getting high 30s in the GE maybe 40
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
He tripped because of the reasons I state. It is indicative of several other issues. None of which will prevent him being PM.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
6% 'all Tories' would perhaps turn over 30 or 40 seats If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
If your ideal vote is reform why would you ever want to vote for Rishi and co? I simply don’t get the logic and it’s not just me the few Reform minded voters I know are way more likely to not bother voting than voting Tory
I think that this is the gap between people who will end up voting Reform, and those who tick Reform in online opinion polls. I think there's quite a strong "protest vote" element in the latter, and those are voters who are in play.
Very much the problem Labour will (and have in the locals) have in turning 'I'm not happy' into the large opinion poll %s. I see Labour getting high 30s in the GE maybe 40
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
I phrased it as "6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories", not Reform UK get 6% in total. Now, I don't know what will happen. If it's Reform 6% in total, then, sure, that will have less impact.
So that makes even less sense - you are assuming that the voters are Tory voters who have decided to vote Reform. I suspect they were Reform or none voters who were willing to vote for Bozo in 2019.
And I go back to my story from the Referendum where a lot of people who never voted, voted in the referendum and also came out in 2019 to ensure what they asked for in 2016 was implemented.
I see those voters as Reform voters the Tories borrowed not disillusioned Tory voters making a protest vote
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
It's a mix of hydrogen and 'normal' gas. Apparently a certain percentage of H2 in the system will be fine...
It's a policy that will go with a bang, no doubt about it.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
If I were CCHQ I think I’d probably try to ignore today’s press conference. Most voters won’t have noticed it except for a cursory mention on this evening’s TV news.
"If Royal Mail directors are happy to wave through the takeover of what is a vital national asset, a full national security review is the minimum that is required. There is after all a reason why other countries have not allowed their postal services to fall into foreign ownership."
Comments
It is, for example, easy to imagine a BBC story centring on particular ethnic minorities being disproportionately the victims of something (from university admissions, to healthcare to crime). Almost impossible to imagine the same focus on particular ethnic minorities as the perpetrators of something.
This is no different from the Daily Mail of course (mutatis mutandis) or the Guardian, but the BBC is, or should be, different.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Last night, while waiting to go to the theatre I went to a Cafe Nero and asked, as I am wont to, for a small decaf americano. So far so good. They put the decaf ground coffee in the little thing and fixed it under the machine. Those little things have two spouts and only one of them was directed into the spout. Half the coffee, coming out of the other spout was going down the drain.
I asked why this was and they said as I'd only asked and paid for a small coffee they couldn't give me the extra shot. I said why didn't they ask me if I wanted the extra shot and they said rules.
I am outraged. They literally poured good coffee down the drain rather than give it to customers.
No lift at the station - wheelchairs going from Platform 1 to Platform 2 go to Nottingham and back (90 minutes) to use their lift. No secure cycle parking (no need - it's quite dangerous to cycle there so no one can go).
The issue is that Railtrack and the transport industry don't give a damn, and won't until forced. It look a Supreme Court action by an individual to even get accessibility law applied to Rail Replacement Services.
It needs a new enforced statutory duty on Railtrack or whatever replaces it.
There's a famous case on this sort of issue called Rhodes vs Central Trains from 2012, finding that a 1 hour diversion to cross platforms was not a "reasonable adjust" to require of a wheelchair user. Yet they will maintain that practice everywhere by default.
https://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/Microsoft Word - Roads v Central Trains Ltd.pdf
Spend a few minutes in silent reflection on what happens to the millions and millions of tons of unsold perishables on shelves and warehouses worldwide annually.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/02/04/the-state-of-process-the-process-state/
We might be able to afford a couple of footbridges, as well
Unfortunately for Sunak this is in Ireland rather than Britain, but Sinn Fein's travails may be an inspiration for him.
But what do you do? News is, definitionally, stuff that is out of the ordinary. The one case not working is news. The thousands of cases that do work aren't. Generally speaking, I think the BBC do do better than most media sources at covering the background stuff, doing the analysis, giving some context. Something like Radio 4's More or Less does this well.
Covering the cases that work, not just the ones that don't, is commercially difficult, so it's the sort of work that requires a Reithian model of public funding.
https://x.com/soniasodha/status/1791042597483426101
[pic of section on gender]
My preferred tipple is Algerian Coffee Stores Swiss Water Processed decaf (high roast) which is very nice indeed.
Edit: in your face @algarkirk
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had:
1) A unique USP in leaving the EU.
2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it.
3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell).
4) Farage was at the top of his game.
5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
I'm also familiar that when priorities are adjusted appropriately the funds somehow appear.
All round a weird experience.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
If its 3.5% Tory, 1% Labour, 1.5% others or NV, maybe 10 or so (based on tightest marginals last time and not including any BXP vote)
Someone with principles. And other principles.
What I would say is that, with so much of the application process now moved online, there's the potential that more fraud is now perpetrated by a smaller number of people.
In the past you might have had more fraud of the type where people were claiming benefits while doing cash in hand work, or lying about one eligibility criterion or another. Nowadays it's more likely to involve a group who have harvested personal data, and making a large number of fraudulent claims.
"Political Betting relaunches as a website dedicated to betting about politics which is never diverted from its central and core activity".
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
Edit: I see this question's already been answered, thanks.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
He looks the part.
The insane effective marginal rates.....
So they need to be redesigned to be more useful, and joined up. Some things need redesigning from the ground up.
An example is the new cycleway / footpath built between Lewes and Polegate the other side of the hedge from the A27. Built in quite a short time, using appropriate powers. AIUI the driver was not "let's improve walking and cycling"; it was "there are too many bloody cyclists on our narrow road". I picked that up from Laura Laker iirc.
What happens now for people walking and cycling is that there is this decent quality bit of infra, and you suddenly fall off the edge of the world at the end of it.
(See if images are working yet)
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/23445960.a27-work-complete-cycle-path-built-east-lewes-scheme/
https://x.com/samlowry60/status/1791064079471128772?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
(Psych Central website)
https://x.com/peston/status/1791074245490966693
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
FFS. Give it a rest.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
When I did a housing estate opening a new area of land behind a ribbon-development main road (in 2013), a Planning Condition was to create 200m of wider 2.5m shared pavement along a section of the footway. Fine ... we took the hit on the land value, of perhaps £40-50k (working from perhaps 50% of standard build costs for the footway as it was an improvement).
There are now Planning Permissions 2 further medium sized (~100 unit) developments of housing there, and the same condition has *not* been applied in either case.
So we have 200m of half-decent cycleway/footway, floating there with nothing either end.
This is one reason why it is such a difficult process.
Developers salami-slicing quality to the legally allowed absolute minimum is another huge problem, as we have discussed, as is a similar approach from Councils wrt walking and cycling infra. The stuff being built around M1 junctions in the late 1960s is generally better than what we are getting now; you can still go out and find it.
Prize for those who remember what that was...
Branding them as "Labour's First Steps..." is a pretty clear acknowledgement of that, so you have to imagine that this is a deliberate safety-first strategy from SKS.
As pledges go, these ones are at least rather more tangible than those chiselled onto the EdStone!
"I'm not Happy".
Which one are you, then?
- Sneezy
- Grumpy
- Bashful
- Sleepy
- Dopey
- A Doc *
* Assuming that all Docs are not Happy,
The joke seems to have been missed by half of the respondents and lots of people sharing it. Which kind pf demonstrates the point of the joke.
Live scenes from Keir Starmer’s 16th relaunch
https://x.com/conservatives/status/1791069039105650690?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
And I go back to my story from the Referendum where a lot of people who never voted, voted in the referendum and also came out in 2019 to ensure what they asked for in 2016 was implemented.
I see those voters as Reform voters the Tories borrowed not disillusioned Tory voters making a protest vote
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Migration
- NL will seek opt-out for (parts of) European asylum/migration policy, and will discuss setting up mini-Schengen’s in times of crisis
- NL will work with EU members to externalise migration policy to 3rd countries
/2
https://x.com/remkorteweg/status/1791044503836696849
You are the poster who spends every day posting TRUSS, I hope you had more self awareness.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/01/14/pb-predictions-competition-2024-entries/
was "Lowest Q1 Labour Lead?"
Do we have an answer?
(I said 9%)
Telegraph