I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Perhaps a wider question is ANPR has crept in absolutely everywhere. It wasn't a million years ago that people were kicking up a massive fuss about use of CCTV cameras and more recently facial recognition. But we are happy as a society with ANPR tracking our every move in our car?
That's what public sector productivity growth looks like. Road policing has been roughly halved since 2010; some of that gap has been covered by ANPR.
My cop friend thinks it's part of the reason the police find it difficult to develop local intelligence on the movement of the baddies - the road cops did a lot of informal information sharing between forces and areas.
Buy a bicycle and face mask if you're worried (but resist the urge to become a Strava wanker like me).
Nothing wrong with a bit of Strava.
I use it so much my partner gets all suspicious when I don't record a ride.
I'd suggest a PB Strava group... But Dura Ace would embarrass us all.
I am still a decent grimpeur and rouleur but top out at about 750W so I have no punch in a sprint.
I only use Strava for running and MTB. I use TrainingPeaks for road cycling because the analysis tools are better.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Liz Truss didn’t spike interest rates.
Not really the point. Whatever she did, it was her perceived incompetence that cost Tory votes and not the outcomes themselves. And you can extend that back to Boris and forwards to Rishi. The Conservative Party got hammered at the election not because of its policies but because it was so incompetent that people stopped listening.
Parallels with Labour might be with 2015 and 2019 when its manifestos consisted of random thoughts, and so many of them that no-one could discern a programme for government. Vote Labour and win a microwave as their American guru dismissed Ed Miliband's campaign.
If voters do not think you can enact your manifesto then it doesn't matter what you promise.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
It makes the government look like it is doing something, so it will probably happen.
As the years go by, I realise that's the reason for a surprising amount of political action, while nobody who knows anything about the issues believes it will solve them. And indeed it often causes a few more unintended problems.
And by the time the changes have been proposed, debated, enacted and assessed, the person responsible will have moved on or retired on an index-linked pension and will be long past caring.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
True, but it comes across as politically difficult when he’s shaking hands with Biden at the time.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Liz Truss didn’t spike interest rates.
Not really the point. Whatever she did, it was her perceived incompetence that cost Tory votes and not the outcomes themselves. And you can extend that back to Boris and forwards to Rishi. The Conservative Party got hammered at the election not because of its policies but because it was so incompetent that people stopped listening.
Parallels with Labour might be with 2015 and 2019 when its manifestos consisted of random thoughts, and so many of them that no-one could discern a programme for government. Vote Labour and win a microwave as their American guru dismissed Ed Miliband's campaign.
If voters do not think you can enact your manifesto then it doesn't matter what you promise.
I know it wasn't the point.
I can't fully agree with your main point however. Sunak's gift was time in Government. He could have put in place an ambitious and eye-catching legislative programme, worked like a trojan to implement it, and used his fabled 'presentational skills' to sell that to the public. He didn't.
I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
True, but it comes across as politically difficult when he’s shaking hands with Biden at the time.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
Doubt Biden or anyone in the US will notice a retirement age being introduced in the Lords!
It's not as if Republicans can even point to it given Trump would be 82 at the end of the next term.
I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
True, but it comes across as politically difficult when he’s shaking hands with Biden at the time.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
Doubt Biden or anyone in the US will notice a retirement age being introduced in the Lords!
It's not as if Republicans can even point to it given Trump would be 82 at the end of the next term.
Also wasn't Reagan's line scripted?
Yes, I think there's no way he came up with it on the spur of the moment. Still a great line.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
In that case, why bother with number plates at all?
The solution is stamped plates, as they have in the US, Japan, and many Middle East countries.
Stamped plates are easy to 3D print. All the necessary physibles are on Barty Bay or similar. Victoria in Australia recently had to introduce directional security stickers on their stamped plates in a doomed attempt to stop the proliferation of forgeries.
I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
True, but it comes across as politically difficult when he’s shaking hands with Biden at the time.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
Reagan's quip was a good response but a bad answer, though, and by the end his age was catching up with him.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
The Queen's work schedule was every bit as hectic as a President's.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
But either would be a better President than Trump!
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
A compulsory facial recognition database with ANPR cameras replaced with facial recognition cameras and a year inside for covering your face while driving would soon sort it.
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
Blair passed proceeds of crime legislation to allow the state to seize the receipts of drug dealing and terrorism. What we got was local councils bankrupting residents who pruned a protected tree without permission based on the imputed increased value of their house as a result of the tree no longer causing a light blocking nuisance.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
The Queen's work schedule was every bit as hectic as a President's.
She was literally dealing with red boxes on her deathbed.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
I don't think most Reform voters are racists, but do think that most racists voted reform.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
The Queen's work schedule was every bit as hectic as a President's.
Lol, no!
Quite rightly no too.
The Queen's work schedule includes delegating most work to the Prime Minister and advisors. The Queen undeniably was a hard worker, whether she had to be or not, but any comparison with POTUS is entirely facetious.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
It helps those who have a vested interest in large numbers of immigrants coming in so they can pay less wages and make more profit, while increasing the general level of misery in society due to more people chasing the same number of houses and paying a higher proportion of their suppressed wages in rent.
Similarly, it also helps Landlords of said houses.
ie it helps the parasites who make a living farming people.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
I don't think most Reform voters are racists, but do think that most racists voted reform.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
It helps those who have a vested in large numbers of immigrants coming in so they can pay less wages and make more profit, while increasing the general level of misery in society due to more people chasing the same number of houses and paying a higher proportion of their suppressed wages in rent.
Similarly, it also helps Landlords of said houses.
ie it helps the parasites who make a living farming people.
You're right. There is a profitable industry in the migration business. Several sectors do very nicely out of them. Both legal and illegal.
I don’t think there’s a direct comparison. The Lords is about lifetime appointments; Biden is standing for election. Labour aren’t making MPs retire at 80. They’re preventing a problem which occurs when you have lifetime appointments. The read-across to the US would be the Supreme Court,
True, but it comes across as politically difficult when he’s shaking hands with Biden at the time.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
Doubt Biden or anyone in the US will notice a retirement age being introduced in the Lords!
It's not as if Republicans can even point to it given Trump would be 82 at the end of the next term.
Also wasn't Reagan's line scripted?
I’m sure that he had worked out with his team beforehand, what his answer might be to a question about his age that had been in the news, but he wasn’t reading it.
It’s also a salient point that, four years later, his age and condition was almost certainly a serious issue. If 1984 had been his first election, he’d have been unlikely to have been put forward again in 1988. That’s where we see the parallels to today’s situation.
A compulsory facial recognition database with ANPR cameras replaced with facial recognition cameras and a year inside for covering your face while driving would soon sort it.
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
Blair passed proceeds of crime legislation to allow the state to seize the receipts of drug dealing and terrorism. What we got was local councils bankrupting residents who pruned a protected tree without permission based on the imputed increased value of their house as a result of the tree no longer causing a light blocking nuisance.
A compulsory facial recognition database with ANPR cameras replaced with facial recognition cameras and a year inside for covering your face while driving would soon sort it.
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
Blair passed proceeds of crime legislation to allow the state to seize the receipts of drug dealing and terrorism. What we got was local councils bankrupting residents who pruned a protected tree without permission based on the imputed increased value of their house as a result of the tree no longer causing a light blocking nuisance.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
In that case, why bother with number plates at all?
Well, that is the question currently being asked about bicycles. Should they be registered in future, as they take over our roads, and as the distinction between e-bikes and motor bikes is a little blurry?
For cars, the system works well enough, partly because most of us are not bank robbers, drug dealers or even what we used to call twockers. It is cheap and resilient. Even so, it is perhaps over-engineered. I see from your number plate that your car was originally registered in Scotland or Southampton but so what? It is a hangover from the 1930s when a small boy would foil the robbers by tipping off the village bobby that the getaway car was from a hundred miles away. It includes the date down to six months, because annual date changes distorted the market. All this auxiliary information could be left in the DVLA database rather than screwed to the front of your car.
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Reform voters are reasonably clear that what they want is lower immigration.
And so did David Cameron but he voted Conservative and look what happened. In any case, immigration is like Brexit, a means to those ends previously listed by me. Nigel Farage's first panacea did not work so let's try his next one.
The Conservatives’ failure to deliver their own promises on immigration appears to be a key factor in the rise of Reform UK. And rather than reducing immigration and Brexit both being a means to an end, Brexit was a means to the end of lowering immigration.
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
It's is really quite comically absurd given the times we live in to claim that peoples' objection to immigration stems from 'not liking immigrants'. There is a very real material impact on housing, infrastructure, the provision of services like health and education, in the importation of vast numbers of people from overseas. It doesn't help anyone to try and mask this with insinuations of 'no blacks no irish' signs.
Feel free to replace “not liking immigrants” with “not liking the existence of immigrants” if it makes you feel better.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
Accept that no system will stop a determined criminal and that utopian attempts will cause more misery than they relieve, so accept it isnt a panacea and do nothing.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
The current system does work 99.9 per cent of the time. It is cheap, efficient and resilient. That's enough for me. Trying to patch up edge cases will make things worse. And how determined does anyone have to be to smear mud on their plates. I've known drivers for whom it happens naturally because they never wash their cars.
A compulsory facial recognition database with ANPR cameras replaced with facial recognition cameras and a year inside for covering your face while driving would soon sort it.
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
Blair passed proceeds of crime legislation to allow the state to seize the receipts of drug dealing and terrorism. What we got was local councils bankrupting residents who pruned a protected tree without permission based on the imputed increased value of their house as a result of the tree no longer causing a light blocking nuisance.
We even had the ludicrous situation of anti terror laws being used to seize assets of Icelandic Banks,
I know we had the cod wars in the seventies. But all the same.
People get nostalgic for new labour. On civil liberties they were poor.
Diane Feinstein says that she 100% supports Biden staying in the race: “I talk to the president about every single week. He is as cogent and thoughtful as he was 30 years ago. All suggestions that he is too old are false”
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
The current system does work 99.9 per cent of the time. It is cheap, efficient and resilient. That's enough for me. Trying to patch up edge cases will make things worse. And how determined does anyone have to be to smear mud on their plates. I've known drivers for whom it happens naturally because they never wash their cars.
99.9% of 'the time' (*) is still a heck of a lot of times it does not work. And in this case, working is important.
It's easy to make a system that's cheap and efficient but doesn't work. And that's the current system. As for 'resilient' : it isn't.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
Accept that no system will stop a determined criminal and that utopian attempts will cause more misery than they relieve, so accept it isnt a panacea and do nothing.
So you would not have any systems to stop criminals at all?
The lat thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
Extreme votes still count, and in any case, I doubt most Reform voters want much more than the rest of us: safety, prosperity, and a halfway competent government that can fix broken Britain or at least look out the window to see if it is raining.
That's the thing. If we accept most Reform and indeed Conservative voters are knocking on a bit, then it follows they mostly have paid off their mortgages so will not have been adversely affected by Liz Truss spiking interest rates. Indeed, as savers, they'd have benefited. And yet look what happened to Conservative poll share.
Competence is key.
Liz Truss didn’t spike interest rates.
Not really the point. Whatever she did, it was her perceived incompetence that cost Tory votes and not the outcomes themselves. And you can extend that back to Boris and forwards to Rishi. The Conservative Party got hammered at the election not because of its policies but because it was so incompetent that people stopped listening.
Parallels with Labour might be with 2015 and 2019 when its manifestos consisted of random thoughts, and so many of them that no-one could discern a programme for government. Vote Labour and win a microwave as their American guru dismissed Ed Miliband's campaign.
If voters do not think you can enact your manifesto then it doesn't matter what you promise.
I know it wasn't the point.
I can't fully agree with your main point however. Sunak's gift was time in Government. He could have put in place an ambitious and eye-catching legislative programme, worked like a trojan to implement it, and used his fabled 'presentational skills' to sell that to the public. He didn't.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
*No* system will stop a determined criminal. What you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
Accept that no system will stop a determined criminal and that utopian attempts will cause more misery than they relieve, so accept it isnt a panacea and do nothing.
So you would not have any systems to stop criminals at all?
No I would leave the existing system in place and not waste money on expensive, utopian and authoritarian measures that achieve little other than making it harder to replace a broken number plate.
“At the moment we have 40,000 outfits purporting to make number plates,” he laughs. “It’s ridiculous. We need to increase the annual fee to be a plate manufacturer – at the moment it’s just £40. The number plate is classed as ‘personal information’ by the Information Commissioner, but we don’t have our driving licences or passports made this way.”
I always presumed they were highly controlled in the way being a locksmith is.
Basically every motor factor does plates. If you're a normal punter, you have to show a V5 before they will make you a plate up, however trade customers sign something to take responsibility and can just get them on demand. Unfortunately, any other solution is wildly impractical - imagine being an accident repair center and having to produce all the paperwork for every car which needs a bumper.
Also, peices of perspex with some letters on and some reflective yellow backing are never going to be particularly difficult to make and are totally unregulated if you apply a sticky label saying "not for road use".
Unfortunately the best fix is to not try and do everything via ANPR as a substitute for actual policing.
Is it 'wildly impractical' ?
My Aussie Ex was bemused by how lax our number plate laws were, and said in Aussie (Vic in her case) you could only have them made at a few set places. Though that might differ state-by-state.
Our current system is an absolute farce. It needs tightening up.
What problem are we trying to solve by tightening up number plate manufacture?
The ex-copper quoted in the article that started this sub-thread said:-
“It’s not hard to defeat the system,” explains Tony Porter, a retired senior police officer and former surveillance commissioner for England and Wales. “You get legitimate number plates being rendered unreadable with mud, or deliberately masked or altered. You get expired plates from scrapped cars being applied to other vehicles, or plates stolen from a parked car to be fitted to another.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/10/anpr-cameras-vigilante-drivers-surveillance/
Restricting who can make plates will fix precisely none of those issues.
Move to metal (stamped) plates for all new cars.
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
Yes and your proposed solution will be expensive, inefficient and still does not address the problem. People, bad people, who are prepared to break the laws against carrying sawn-off shotguns, robbing banks or selling drugs, are also not above fitting false plates. Even if every number plate in the land has to be signed by the King himself, people can still cover them in mud, alter them with tape or paint, or steal plates from another car. Or just use one of the thousands of kits that will be made redundant when your measures go through parliament.
The bigger issue is actually cloned plates, where the criminals spot a car that looks like theirs (same model, year, colour), then gets a dodgy local garage to make up identical plates for their car.
This results in innocent motorists being perused through the courts, both civil and criminal, totally unaware that an offence has occurred, and traffic police also not knowing that two cars are running around with the same plate, often in totally different parts of the country.
A police car will stop you if you have your plate covered in mud or a piece of tape crudely trying to alter it. Stolen plates are also immediately reported as such.
These are the problems fixed by a stamped plate system, as the dodgy local garages (apart from perhaps Mr Ace and his 3d printer, which won’t produce one good enough to pass a traffic policeman’s eye) are eliminated. Most countries with stamped plates use the VIN as the primary index in the database, whereas in the UK the plate is the primary index.
A compulsory facial recognition database with ANPR cameras replaced with facial recognition cameras and a year inside for covering your face while driving would soon sort it.
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
It won't go down well in Conservative Towers either.
What you describe is dystopian and would be wide open to abuse.
Regarding Biden - he has an illness. He is not 'knocking on a bit'. The Queen had over a decade of successful reigning in her at Biden's age. It's deeply insulting to 80 year olds to suggest that they're all past it. We need to realise this and make the distinction.
Didn't know the queen was running the country!
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
The Queen's work schedule was every bit as hectic as a President's.
She was literally dealing with red boxes on her deathbed.
I don’t think ‘literally’.
‘Look, the old dear’s only got a few hours left on this mortal coil, let’s get her to give the latest Tory government lunacy a once over.’
Comments
A big issue is that number plates are used for much more than they were a few decades ago. A years or so ago, my parents had the police rocking up to their door because their car had been used in something illegal. The number plate had been cloned. Large amounts of police and other resources are being wasted because owner, car and plates are *not* reliably linked. It also decreases road safety as @sshats think they can just chuck a false plate onto a car and go speeding.
I only use Strava for running and MTB. I use TrainingPeaks for road cycling because the analysis tools are better.
Parallels with Labour might be with 2015 and 2019 when its manifestos consisted of random thoughts, and so many of them that no-one could discern a programme for government. Vote Labour and win a microwave as their American guru dismissed Ed Miliband's campaign.
If voters do not think you can enact your manifesto then it doesn't matter what you promise.
As the years go by, I realise that's the reason for a surprising amount of political action, while nobody who knows anything about the issues believes it will solve them. And indeed it often causes a few more unintended problems.
And by the time the changes have been proposed, debated, enacted and assessed, the person responsible will have moved on or retired on an index-linked pension and will be long past caring.
Someone’s age and mental acuity is fair game when they’re up for election.
Reagan had possibly the best response ever to the question, when he replied to the debate questioner that he had no intention of exploiting [Mondale’s] youth and inexperience for political gain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJhCjMfRndk Both Mondale and the audience laughed at the line.
One gets the impression that Biden couldn’t think of a line like that on his feet at the moment.
My parents are in their 80s, and both in remarkably good shape for their age.
They both do a handful of hours a week volunteer work, and very effectively so far as I can tell. Neither would be able to manage even the softest full time job.
I can't fully agree with your main point however. Sunak's gift was time in Government. He could have put in place an ambitious and eye-catching legislative programme, worked like a trojan to implement it, and used his fabled 'presentational skills' to sell that to the public. He didn't.
It's not as if Republicans can even point to it given Trump would be 82 at the end of the next term.
Also wasn't Reagan's line scripted?
A portion of the UK electorate really doesn’t like immigrants. They voted Conservative to reduce immigration, they voted Brexit to reduce immigration, and when immigration went up, they voted Reform UK instead. We have polling showing opposition to immigration being a key issue for Leave voters, and a key issue for 2024 Reform UK voters (was it 60% saying it was the most important issue for them?).
Won't go down well in Guardian Towers though.
As ever, the question is what privacy we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good and will the other uses such a system might be put to by the government and its agencies be worse than allowing a small part of society to cause misery.to others.
Blair passed proceeds of crime legislation to allow the state to seize the receipts of drug dealing and terrorism. What we got was local councils bankrupting residents who pruned a protected tree without permission based on the imputed increased value of their house as a result of the tree no longer causing a light blocking nuisance.
Quite rightly no too.
The Queen's work schedule includes delegating most work to the Prime Minister and advisors. The Queen undeniably was a hard worker, whether she had to be or not, but any comparison with POTUS is entirely facetious.
Similarly, it also helps Landlords of said houses.
ie it helps the parasites who make a living farming people.
I do think most Reform voters are racists.
It’s also a salient point that, four years later, his age and condition was almost certainly a serious issue. If 1984 had been his first election, he’d have been unlikely to have been put forward again in 1988. That’s where we see the parallels to today’s situation.
https://www.timms-law.com/commercial-and-property-homeowner-fined-for-cutting-back-tree/
The current system simply does not work. What would be your proposal?
For cars, the system works well enough, partly because most of us are not bank robbers, drug dealers or even what we used to call twockers. It is cheap and resilient. Even so, it is perhaps over-engineered. I see from your number plate that your car was originally registered in Scotland or Southampton but so what? It is a hangover from the 1930s when a small boy would foil the robbers by tipping off the village bobby that the getaway car was from a hundred miles away. It includes the date down to six months, because annual date changes distorted the market. All this auxiliary information could be left in the DVLA database rather than screwed to the front of your car.
I know we had the cod wars in the seventies. But all the same.
People get nostalgic for new labour. On civil liberties they were poor.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7688560.stm
It's just that now you can't persuade them they were wrong. So no change for Marx.
It's easy to make a system that's cheap and efficient but doesn't work. And that's the current system. As for 'resilient' : it isn't.
(*) A figure you've plucked out of your backside.
NEW THREAD
This results in innocent motorists being perused through the courts, both civil and criminal, totally unaware that an offence has occurred, and traffic police also not knowing that two cars are running around with the same plate, often in totally different parts of the country.
A police car will stop you if you have your plate covered in mud or a piece of tape crudely trying to alter it. Stolen plates are also immediately reported as such.
These are the problems fixed by a stamped plate system, as the dodgy local garages (apart from perhaps Mr Ace and his 3d printer, which won’t produce one good enough to pass a traffic policeman’s eye) are eliminated. Most countries with stamped plates use the VIN as the primary index in the database, whereas in the UK the plate is the primary index.
What you describe is dystopian and would be wide open to abuse.
‘Look, the old dear’s only got a few hours left on this mortal coil, let’s get her to give the latest Tory government lunacy a once over.’