Becca Lyon from @savechildrenuk : "It's an outrage 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year
“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families facing hardship and destitution".
I want to say a week from the GE I am experiencing deja vu from the 1997 Blair win with a mixture of relief that Starmer has won and looks not only competent but also is leading a government that seems to have acknowledged the depth of the crisis and do have some interesting ideas
I am impressed with Wes Streeting with his declaration that the NHS is broken and his proposal to divert money from the NHS to GPS and involve the private sector in both dentistry and reducing the waiting lists
My daughter is in a senior position in the DWP and said she had received a notice from Liz Kendall that a zoom call will happen today no doubt to outline Labour's proposals to get many back to work and address the huge benefit bill
In many ways the conservatives had similar proposals but they did not have the political capital to carry them out whereas Labour do
If I was giving points it would be 8/10 for Starmer and Labour and 2/10 for the conservatives only awarded as recognition that Sunak has been courageous enough to take the flack and remain in post until his successor is chosen, rather than the option of heading to California to enjoy his riches
Labour havent actually done anything yet except a few PRish positioning calls. It is way to early too say what is happening. Give it 6 months and then see how things are looking.
Rachel Reeves is trying to talk us all in to gloom while the economic data behind her just isnt playing ball. I'd have more respect for her if she just stopped spinning crap and provided a balanced view.
You've been in business all your life, AB. You know that when a new boss takes over a company, they get all the bad news out in public at the first opportunity. Why do you expect the public sector to be different from the private ?
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
It took the Labour party to create the NHS in defiance of Tory wishes, it just takes Wes and the Labour Party to destroy it with their new Tory supporters like Sunil cheering on.
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
German TV commentary and analysis agreed that it was a penalty according to the rules - though I've noticed German commentators rarely disagree much with referee decisions. OTH, Bild, for example, has splashed on Neville saying it was never a penalty.
German consensus after the Switzerland game: England played badly but are in the semis, whereas Germany played well but are out. Them's the breaks.
German consensus after last night: England deserved to win, but where the hell was this team for the first 5 matches? England's chances of winning the final have increased from approximately zero before last night's game, to maybe 40%.
This is just one aspect of football's institutional stupidity.
If there is a transgression, the only thing you can do is award a free kick, which if it's inside the area is a penalty. But for some acts of blatant cheating - pulling down a forward running through at goal, but outside the penalty area, from where the chances of a goal are maybe 20%, the punishment - a free kick, from which the chances of scoring a goal are probably rather less than 2%, and a yellow card - seems a ridiculously small sanction. For other minor transgressions which happen to be in the box: yes, they need sanction, but you have gone from a 5% chance of scoring to a 75% chance of scoring.
In rugby, there is a much better balance between the magnitude of the transgression and the chances of profiting from the situation. And if you transgress, and get caught, you are always worse off than if you did not transgress.
None of this would matter so much if football wasn't such a ridiculously low scoring game. In a high-scoring game like rugby the unfairnesses even themselves out over time. Whereas in football every one is pored over and everyone agonises about how things could have been different. Usually in sport, one individual or team deserves to win, and wins: you rarely come out of a sporting occasion having lost and thinking 'we should have won that but for incident x, which was unfair for reason y. But in football you almost always do. It's almost designed to make people cross.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Football is stupid.
Yes I agree with that. The penalty last night seemed unfair, but correct according to the rules. VAR means that any foul in the penalty area is likely to lead to goal, even when as in this case, the foul was unintentional AND the ball was already heading out of play (so actually 0% chance of scoring). Make it an indirect free kick? They won't change the rules though, because controversy sells. Also making defenders less wary of challenging players in the penalty area would presumably lead to even fewer goals being scored.
The rules have changed, I think, since I was refereeing so I am on slightly dodgy ground here, but in my day it would not have been a penalty because there was no apparent intent and it therefore could not have been a 'technical offence' i.e., a free kick. It could have been a non-technical offence, namely dangerous play. That would have meant an indirect free-kick. I have rarely seen an indirect free-kick given to the attacking team inside the penalty area, but it is not unknown. You tend to remember the incidents because they usually produce the oddity of most of the outfield players standing on the goal line. (It's a rare instance of players being able to stand less than ten yards from the ball while the kick is being taken if the offence happened closer than ten yards from from the goal-line. Players must stand ten yards OR on the goal-line, even if that is less - so they obviously cram the goal.)
I think the VAR team got it wrong. In my opinion it was simply an accidental collision arising from the genuine attempts of both players to play the ball. You could reasonably argue that it was possibly dangerous play, but VAR has no power to intervene for such an offence, and if the ref didn't give it, they had no basis for intervention. There was no intent, so no foul on that basis, and since it was a legitimate and normal attempt to play the ball I can't see why any penalty was given. I wouldn't have given a foul for that no matter where it was on the field of play, and I don't think many refs would.
It was just a mistake.
I think the easiest test is to reverse the teams - if that had been given against England we would be up in arms for years.
I want to say a week from the GE I am experiencing deja vu from the 1997 Blair win with a mixture of relief that Starmer has won and looks not only competent but also is leading a government that seems to have acknowledged the depth of the crisis and do have some interesting ideas
I am impressed with Wes Streeting with his declaration that the NHS is broken and his proposal to divert money from the NHS to GPS and involve the private sector in both dentistry and reducing the waiting lists
My daughter is in a senior position in the DWP and said she had received a notice from Liz Kendall that a zoom call will happen today no doubt to outline Labour's proposals to get many back to work and address the huge benefit bill
In many ways the conservatives had similar proposals but they did not have the political capital to carry them out whereas Labour do
If I was giving points it would be 8/10 for Starmer and Labour and 2/10 for the conservatives only awarded as recognition that Sunak has been courageous enough to take the flack and remain in post until his successor is chosen, rather than the option of heading to California to enjoy his riches
Labour havent actually done anything yet except a few PRish positioning calls. It is way to early too say what is happening. Give it 6 months and then see how things are looking.
Rachel Reeves is trying to talk us all in to gloom while the economic data behind her just isnt playing ball. I'd have more respect for her if she just stopped spinning crap and provided a balanced view.
You've been in business all your life, AB. You know that when a new boss takes over a company, they get all the bad news out in public at the first opportunity. Why do you expect the public sector to be different from the private ?
Yes of course, and like most organisations where this happens the workforce think the CEO is a lying bastard and is simply softening us up for a shafting.
Reeves has been spouting twaddle for the last week and rather than convince me at any rate. I now think she's a bit shifty, The UK undoubtedly has problems but its a mixed picture. Growth, inflation looking better than expected public finances a mess. But she cant give a balanced view because she needs to tax the arse of everyone rather than cut spending.
he plans to table amendments to Rachel Reeves' first Budget to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
He’s a Labour MP, and is going to try and amend the budget with an uncosted spending plan?
Good luck with keeping the whip then, or perhaps that was his intention all along…
I suspect there is a lot of discussion to be had on this over the summer within Labour. Most of them hate defending this policy.
It’s one of those policies that, once enacted, becomes exceedingly difficult and very expensive to abolish.
It carries a financial cost (£xbn), a political cost (a large rise in benefits given to a small number of people seen as undeserving), disincentivises work for these people, and helps prop up house prices.
I see Kendall is this morning on about how terrible child poverty is. But planning not to do anything about the two child cap.
I can't see how they keep this up for five years.
The danger for Sir Keir is that he ends up like Francois Hollande. Alienates his natural (leftish) supporters by not delivering for them while the more transactional supporters drift off. To govern is to choose. Avoid doing that and you can land in big political trouble.
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
You also get cover if you join a group like Cycling UK. I am a member.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
The last thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
The ideal for the Conservatives is to get the votes of Reform backers without turning into Reform themselves. Partly because it would be bad government, but also because there are still more votes to lose on their left flank.
Unfortunately, that's not easy to do. The best way would have been to strangle them at birth, but it's about twenty years too later for that.
Do you mean by attempting to deceive them by putting a few right wing bones in the manifesto you have no intention of implementing (the norm)?
Which no longer works.
Or actually addressing the problem which means both building a lot more houses on nimby members prized view and stopping immigration to the extent that there is net migration to facilitate a house price collapase so that under 40s can get somewhere to live without paying an extortionate amount?
All of which is anathema to the wealthy vested interests controlling the party.
How stupid can you be, anyone facilitating a house price collapse would be out on their arses tout suite. Typical selfish arseholes wanting to bankrupt lots of people because they want everything for nothing. Get out and earn enough to buy a house you sad sick loser.
A house price collapse doesn't bankrupt anyone, it just makes costs more affordable. If you've been paying off your mortgage (or paid it off) you owe less or nothing on your home already, it's those who need to buy one we should be caring about not those who already have one.
Costs going up is a bad thing, costs going down is a good thing. Or do you want gas prices and other costs to only ever go up?
The only people who lose big time are.
Those that inherit. Investors/Landlords with multiple properties. The government if the owner goes into care as the self funded money runs out quicker.
Excess asset price inflation is just as corrosive to society as any other type of inflation. It is at the root of most of the ills that currently bedevill our society.
People who need to sell e.g. because they change jobs, also lose big time. At the start of the 90s there were lots of people who wanted to move but could not do so because the market was stagnant.
Which is utterly miniscule compared to the number of people who lose out by being priced out of the market altogether due to overvalued costs.
It can also be addressed (and has been by other countries) by transferable mortgages.
Even if you go into negative equity its only a paper problem unless it gets realised, ride it out and inflation will eventually mean you're out of it - or you continue to/finish paying off your mortgage so mathematically must come out of it eventually as you'll ultimately owe nothing.
Anyone paying interest-only on a mortgage, or remortgaging to realise paper gains only to end up with a paper loss deserves little sympathy for their foolishness.
People talk about negative equity as if its a problem for life.
In reality to be in negative equity you need to have:
1) Bought pretty much at the top of the market 2) Put down a very minimal deposit 3) Not reduced the outstanding mortgage amount by repayment
Negative equity results from a combination of greed, stupidity and bad luck.
And negative equity is only an issue if you want to sell. Why not just stay put in the house you have bought?
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
You also get cover if you join a group like Cycling UK. I am a member.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
I have no dog in this fight per se as I both ride a bike and drive a car. One question I would ask is what is the liability limit on most people's house and contents insurance? Will it be sufficient to cover for the claims resulting from injuring someone else?
I have to have public liability for various public facing things I do including, for example, running events like open days or meetings. Generally this is in the low hundreds of pounds a year premium. How does this compare with the average person's house and contents insurance?
It took the Labour party to create the NHS in defiance of Tory wishes, it just takes Wes and the Labour Party to destroy it with their new Tory supporters like Sunil cheering on.
Why do you object to the NHS helping people get back to work? And how does helping people get back to work somehow destroy the NHS?
The Democrats are relying on retaking House seats in NY to regain control of Congress. The recent polling there does not look good for them.
A number of the more vocal calls for him to stand aside, are those worried about down-ticket elections.
In many states, it’s possible to just fill in a single party box at the top of the ballot paper, to vote for that party’s candidate for everyone from the President to the local dog catcher. So if the candidate for President is unpopular, a lot of people abstain from many of the other elections held at the same time, if they turn out at all.
They are going to lose House, Senate and WH at this rate.
That’s what’s worrying those in marginal House, Senate, and local seats.
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
You also get cover if you join a group like Cycling UK. I am a member.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
Correct. I get it as a perk of my bank account too - for travel in Europe iirc.
And there's also at least one trade union that has it as a standard benefit iirc.
In my more mischievous moments I want cycling insurance to be a compulsory inclusion in all motor insurance policies, just to annoy Howard Cox.
German TV commentary and analysis agreed that it was a penalty according to the rules - though I've noticed German commentators rarely disagree much with referee decisions. OTH, Bild, for example, has splashed on Neville saying it was never a penalty.
German consensus after the Switzerland game: England played badly but are in the semis, whereas Germany played well but are out. Them's the breaks.
German consensus after last night: England deserved to win, but where the hell was this team for the first 5 matches? England's chances of winning the final have increased from approximately zero before last night's game, to maybe 40%.
This is just one aspect of football's institutional stupidity.
If there is a transgression, the only thing you can do is award a free kick, which if it's inside the area is a penalty. But for some acts of blatant cheating - pulling down a forward running through at goal, but outside the penalty area, from where the chances of a goal are maybe 20%, the punishment - a free kick, from which the chances of scoring a goal are probably rather less than 2%, and a yellow card - seems a ridiculously small sanction. For other minor transgressions which happen to be in the box: yes, they need sanction, but you have gone from a 5% chance of scoring to a 75% chance of scoring.
In rugby, there is a much better balance between the magnitude of the transgression and the chances of profiting from the situation. And if you transgress, and get caught, you are always worse off than if you did not transgress.
None of this would matter so much if football wasn't such a ridiculously low scoring game. In a high-scoring game like rugby the unfairnesses even themselves out over time. Whereas in football every one is pored over and everyone agonises about how things could have been different. Usually in sport, one individual or team deserves to win, and wins: you rarely come out of a sporting occasion having lost and thinking 'we should have won that but for incident x, which was unfair for reason y. But in football you almost always do. It's almost designed to make people cross.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Football is stupid.
Yes I agree with that. The penalty last night seemed unfair, but correct according to the rules. VAR means that any foul in the penalty area is likely to lead to goal, even when as in this case, the foul was unintentional AND the ball was already heading out of play (so actually 0% chance of scoring). Make it an indirect free kick? They won't change the rules though, because controversy sells. Also making defenders less wary of challenging players in the penalty area would presumably lead to even fewer goals being scored.
The rules have changed, I think, since I was refereeing so I am on slightly dodgy ground here, but in my day it would not have been a penalty because there was no apparent intent and it therefore could not have been a 'technical offence' i.e., a free kick. It could have been a non-technical offence, namely dangerous play. That would have meant an indirect free-kick. I have rarely seen an indirect free-kick given to the attacking team inside the penalty area, but it is not unknown. You tend to remember the incidents because they usually produce the oddity of most of the outfield players standing on the goal line. (It's a rare instance of players being able to stand less than ten yards from the ball while the kick is being taken if the offence happened closer than ten yards from from the goal-line. Players must stand ten yards OR on the goal-line, even if that is less - so they obviously cram the goal.)
I think the VAR team got it wrong. In my opinion it was simply an accidental collision arising from the genuine attempts of both players to play the ball. You could reasonably argue that it was possibly dangerous play, but VAR has no power to intervene for such an offence, and if the ref didn't give it, they had no basis for intervention. There was no intent, so no foul on that basis, and since it was a legitimate and normal attempt to play the ball I can't see why any penalty was given. I wouldn't have given a foul for that no matter where it was on the field of play, and I don't think many refs would.
It was just a mistake.
I think the easiest test is to reverse the teams - if that had been given against England we would be up in arms for years.
Of course. And when England play Netherlands in a World Cup knockout match in 2042 with Harry Kane as England manager it will be sweet revenge for them. Swings and roundabouts.
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
You also get cover if you join a group like Cycling UK. I am a member.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
I have no dog in this fight per se as I both ride a bike and drive a car. One question I would ask is what is the liability limit on most people's house and contents insurance? Will it be sufficient to cover for the claims resulting from injuring someone else?
I have to have public liability for various public facing things I do including, for example, running events like open days or meetings. Generally this is in the low hundreds of pounds a year premium. How does this compare with the average person's house and contents insurance?
I am pretty sure the one I get is £100,000 which should be adequate. But it is not house and contents related.
“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.
Well said, something I can completely agree with you on.
We don't need an authoritarian desire for perfection to replace the good enough.
This isn't an 80/20 problem, its a 99.5/0.5 problem and the 99.5 is good enough and the 0.5 is never getting addressed whatever you do.
I agree too. But it's a balancing act, and you'd want to keep an eye on it. Two other examples:
Reg plates for cyclists. Definitely not worth it. AI cameras for phone use. Probably worth it - one relatively cheap, mobile camera can catch thousands of drivers. It's as bad as drink driving and requires a deterrent.
Not sure about reg plates for cyclists as such but when I lived in Switzerland you had to buy a little metal sticker for your bike each year which gave it a registration number that you downloaded to a database in case it was found etc but more importantly the cost of the sticker paid for an insurance policy.
So all cyclists were insured for accidents on their bikes for damage to anyone or anything else which was a good thing. Wasn’t expensive, about £30 per year I think I recall.
This may be an FTP (not sure).
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
You also get cover if you join a group like Cycling UK. I am a member.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
I have no dog in this fight per se as I both ride a bike and drive a car. One question I would ask is what is the liability limit on most people's house and contents insurance? Will it be sufficient to cover for the claims resulting from injuring someone else?
I have to have public liability for various public facing things I do including, for example, running events like open days or meetings. Generally this is in the low hundreds of pounds a year premium. How does this compare with the average person's house and contents insurance?
The figures relevant to 3rd Party Liability are in my table for some of the policies, but it depends on the activity and would be for Personal liability, not corporate or events etc. Though terms vary between policies, and would be detailed in the booklet.
There would also be exclusions around damage caused whilst doing a dangerous sport etc.
German TV commentary and analysis agreed that it was a penalty according to the rules - though I've noticed German commentators rarely disagree much with referee decisions. OTH, Bild, for example, has splashed on Neville saying it was never a penalty.
German consensus after the Switzerland game: England played badly but are in the semis, whereas Germany played well but are out. Them's the breaks.
German consensus after last night: England deserved to win, but where the hell was this team for the first 5 matches? England's chances of winning the final have increased from approximately zero before last night's game, to maybe 40%.
This is just one aspect of football's institutional stupidity.
If there is a transgression, the only thing you can do is award a free kick, which if it's inside the area is a penalty. But for some acts of blatant cheating - pulling down a forward running through at goal, but outside the penalty area, from where the chances of a goal are maybe 20%, the punishment - a free kick, from which the chances of scoring a goal are probably rather less than 2%, and a yellow card - seems a ridiculously small sanction. For other minor transgressions which happen to be in the box: yes, they need sanction, but you have gone from a 5% chance of scoring to a 75% chance of scoring.
In rugby, there is a much better balance between the magnitude of the transgression and the chances of profiting from the situation. And if you transgress, and get caught, you are always worse off than if you did not transgress.
None of this would matter so much if football wasn't such a ridiculously low scoring game. In a high-scoring game like rugby the unfairnesses even themselves out over time. Whereas in football every one is pored over and everyone agonises about how things could have been different. Usually in sport, one individual or team deserves to win, and wins: you rarely come out of a sporting occasion having lost and thinking 'we should have won that but for incident x, which was unfair for reason y. But in football you almost always do. It's almost designed to make people cross.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Football is stupid.
Yes I agree with that. The penalty last night seemed unfair, but correct according to the rules. VAR means that any foul in the penalty area is likely to lead to goal, even when as in this case, the foul was unintentional AND the ball was already heading out of play (so actually 0% chance of scoring). Make it an indirect free kick? They won't change the rules though, because controversy sells. Also making defenders less wary of challenging players in the penalty area would presumably lead to even fewer goals being scored.
The rules have changed, I think, since I was refereeing so I am on slightly dodgy ground here, but in my day it would not have been a penalty because there was no apparent intent and it therefore could not have been a 'technical offence' i.e., a free kick. It could have been a non-technical offence, namely dangerous play. That would have meant an indirect free-kick. I have rarely seen an indirect free-kick given to the attacking team inside the penalty area, but it is not unknown. You tend to remember the incidents because they usually produce the oddity of most of the outfield players standing on the goal line. (It's a rare instance of players being able to stand less than ten yards from the ball while the kick is being taken if the offence happened closer than ten yards from from the goal-line. Players must stand ten yards OR on the goal-line, even if that is less - so they obviously cram the goal.)
I think the VAR team got it wrong. In my opinion it was simply an accidental collision arising from the genuine attempts of both players to play the ball. You could reasonably argue that it was possibly dangerous play, but VAR has no power to intervene for such an offence, and if the ref didn't give it, they had no basis for intervention. There was no intent, so no foul on that basis, and since it was a legitimate and normal attempt to play the ball I can't see why any penalty was given. I wouldn't have given a foul for that no matter where it was on the field of play, and I don't think many refs would.
It was just a mistake.
I think the easiest test is to reverse the teams - if that had been given against England we would be up in arms for years.
It really depends why it happens though.
Last night's ref controlled the game well, although he made a few mistakes (but not the penalty.) I seethe still over the Brazilian ref who took the England/France game in Qatar. He gave every marginal decision to France, so you knew he was crooked.
Mistakes you can live with, dishonesty should never be forgotten or forgiven.
Sunak and Hunt are serious people and have just left the Conservative party to its worst defeat in its history. I expect most Tory members and many Tory MPs will first be looking for a leader who can win back some voters who went to ReformUK while also holding onto almost all who stayed Conservative on 4th July.
Braverman may do the former but not the latter, Badenoch could do both. Tugendhat is a serious candidate who would hold most current Tory voters and maybe win back some lost to the LDs but he wouldn't win back any lost to Reform and could leak further to Farage
Whilst not disagreeing with your analysis of what each contender would achieve regarding lost voters to Reform and LDs I do think it unfair to blame Sunak and Hunt. I can't think of much Hunt did wrong and although Sunak led a poor campaign he was handed a hospital pass.
For me the blame lays squarely with Boris. I accept that the Tories were probably going to lose anyway after so long in power, but to lose so badly is down to Boris (and Boris came about because of Brexit).
On another note prior to the election you kept wanting to add Reform to the Tory count presuming they would come back to the fold and still believe Reform voters are ex Tories. Lots are, but lots aren't. They are disaffected voters from all parties. Something the LDs used to gain a lot from. During our (LD) knocking up in Guildford of 'Ours' and 'Probables' we came across a not inconsiderable number who voted Reform. So people who said they were voting LD in a LD target and went and voted Reform.
You can not add the Reform vote to the Tory count.
No they lost so badly because of Truss, it was her budget disaster and the consequent surge in interest rates and mortgage repayments that collapsed the Tories to around 20%. Under Boris even after partygate the Conservatives were still around 30%. Hence Truss lost her seat.
I disagree. You can't blame it all on Truss. It was an ongoing disaster. And why did Truss happen? Truss wouldn't have been an event if not for Boris. It is Boris that caused the scenario that allowed for the Truss disaster. It all goes back to Boris and Brexit. Yes the Tories would still have lost, just because, but he was the catalyst that started off the big decline.
Re the percentage you quote, these are misleading. The Tories dropped their vote from 2019 to 2024. They had to go somewhere. But these aren't Tories these are the floaters that when a party is doing well are picked up (Tories in 2019) and are lost when they are doing badly (Tories 2024). They don't belong to the Tories, they belong to whoever is popular at the time, or picking up the none of the other vote.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
The obvious economic path for the UK was surely to be a world leader in green tech. Instead we got a decade of focusing on Brexit.
It took the Labour party to create the NHS in defiance of Tory wishes, it just takes Wes and the Labour Party to destroy it with their new Tory supporters like Sunil cheering on.
Why should you care about Labour now? You turned your back on it, and joined the Green Tories.
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
If this is a genuine phenomenon then surely downsizing is more to do with mortgage costs than school fees. It would have to be a major downsize too to justify the moving and stamp duty costs.
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
If this is a genuine phenomenon then surely downsizing is more to do with mortgage costs than school fees. It would have to be a major downsize too to justify the moving and stamp duty costs.
Yep - it's the typical story that only works for 30 seconds until the fundamental flaws (£x000 in stamp duty, £y000 in moving costs) make the story completely implausible.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
I've tried to find out how long Hinkley Point C has been under construction, and I've found three different construction start dates, in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
It's no wonder that people are able to avoid admitting mistakes, when the web provides such a plethora of facts to choose from.
Sunak and Hunt are serious people and have just left the Conservative party to its worst defeat in its history. I expect most Tory members and many Tory MPs will first be looking for a leader who can win back some voters who went to ReformUK while also holding onto almost all who stayed Conservative on 4th July.
Braverman may do the former but not the latter, Badenoch could do both. Tugendhat is a serious candidate who would hold most current Tory voters and maybe win back some lost to the LDs but he wouldn't win back any lost to Reform and could leak further to Farage
Whilst not disagreeing with your analysis of what each contender would achieve regarding lost voters to Reform and LDs I do think it unfair to blame Sunak and Hunt. I can't think of much Hunt did wrong and although Sunak led a poor campaign he was handed a hospital pass.
For me the blame lays squarely with Boris. I accept that the Tories were probably going to lose anyway after so long in power, but to lose so badly is down to Boris (and Boris came about because of Brexit).
On another note prior to the election you kept wanting to add Reform to the Tory count presuming they would come back to the fold and still believe Reform voters are ex Tories. Lots are, but lots aren't. They are disaffected voters from all parties. Something the LDs used to gain a lot from. During our (LD) knocking up in Guildford of 'Ours' and 'Probables' we came across a not inconsiderable number who voted Reform. So people who said they were voting LD in a LD target and went and voted Reform.
You can not add the Reform vote to the Tory count.
No they lost so badly because of Truss, it was her budget disaster and the consequent surge in interest rates and mortgage repayments that collapsed the Tories to around 20%. Under Boris even after partygate the Conservatives were still around 30%. Hence Truss lost her seat.
I disagree. You can't blame it all on Truss. It was an ongoing disaster. And why did Truss happen? Truss wouldn't have been an event if not for Boris. It is Boris that caused the scenario that allowed for the Truss disaster. It all goes back to Boris and Brexit. Yes the Tories would still have lost, just because, but he was the catalyst that started off the big decline.
Re the percentage you quote, these are misleading. The Tories dropped their vote from 2019 to 2024. They had to go somewhere. But these aren't Tories these are the floaters that when a party is doing well are picked up (Tories in 2019) and are lost when they are doing badly (Tories 2024). They don't belong to the Tories, they belong to whoever is popular at the time, or picking up the none of the other vote.
1. It is a penalty under the laws of the game (it's a certain foul anywhere else on the pitch). 2. I would have been furious had it been given against England. 3. Kane probably wasn't put off by the tackle.
All of these things can be, and are, true simultaneously.
One way I have learned to reconcile these matters is that if you allow a striker into your penalty area and attempt to tackle him, you are risking a penalty, pure and simple. If you don't want to concede a penalty don't let him breach your 18-yard box.
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.
Do you have a linky for that last claim?
Did @MrBedfordshire back this claim up, of someone pruning a TPO Tree being bankrupted after being pursued under Proceeds of Crime law?
I'd really like to see it, as I have never seen POCA used wrt TPO trees, and it is in my area of interest. Getting permission to prune is not difficult, and is free, and we treat damaging TPO trees as an attack on the system of maintaining the public environment, which is what it is.
The closest I am aware of was a millionaire scrote on Sandbanks who added £40k to the value of his property by destroying two TPO trees.
He got off lightly: all he got done for was £2700 fine, £15500 court costs, and the £40k profits he had made by illegally destroying the trees. That fine could have been £25k.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
I've tried to find out how long Hinkley Point C has been under construction, and I've found three different construction start dates, in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
It's no wonder that people are able to avoid admitting mistakes, when the web provides such a plethora of facts to choose from.
The bigger issue is when it will get finished, at what cost, whether it works - and how it is dealing with the failure to develop the fish-scarer that was one of the planning requirements.
Half the Board of EDF resigning before the decision to proceed was taken should have sounded alarm bells with government. But the last government was sat so snugly in nuclear's lower intestine. Hopefully this government is significantly more curious about value for money.
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
If this is a genuine phenomenon then surely downsizing is more to do with mortgage costs than school fees. It would have to be a major downsize too to justify the moving and stamp duty costs.
More efficient use of the housing stock increasing supply from nothing. 4D chess from Labour. Their genius is almost frightening.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Some Greens, doubtless, but it's irksome to have a whole group labelled with a view due to individual members of the group having that view.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
The obvious economic path for the UK was surely to be a world leader in green tech. Instead we got a decade of focusing on Brexit.
Industrial Strategies are not allowed to exist in Toryland.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
If this is a genuine phenomenon then surely downsizing is more to do with mortgage costs than school fees. It would have to be a major downsize too to justify the moving and stamp duty costs.
More efficient use of the housing stock increasing supply from nothing. 4D chess from Labour. Their genius is almost frightening.
4D chess would be doing various juggles to increase occupation density in the millions of owner occupied houses with 2 or more spare bedrooms.
There are lots of options. Rebalancing costs whilst alive vs IHT so that oldsters rattling around in 4 and 5 bed houses were incentivised to downsize earlier rather than wait until they pop their clogs for the IHT exemption would be a start for one track.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
It's going to be interesting to see how these non-MP ministerial appointments work out.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
The obvious economic path for the UK was surely to be a world leader in green tech. Instead we got a decade of focusing on Brexit.
Industrial Strategies are not allowed to exist in Toryland.
But why? Is this some throwback to failed ones in the 70s (before my time). If so I'd suggest there is a big difference between protecting old industries and building new ones.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
It's going to be interesting to see how these non-MP ministerial appointments work out.
Indeed, the Goats don't have a great track record, it must be said. I like the cut of Timpson's gib though. He seems like a man with a big idea.
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.
Do you have a linky for that last claim?
Did @MrBedfordshire back this claim up, of someone pruning a TPO Tree being bankrupted after being pursued under Proceeds of Crime law?
I'd really like to see it, as I have never seen POCA used wrt TPO trees, and it is in my area of interest. Getting permission to prune is not difficult, and is free, and we treat damaging TPO trees as an attack on the system of maintaining the public environment, which is what it is.
The closest I am aware of was a millionaire scrote on Sandbanks who added £40k to the value of his property by destroying two TPO trees.
He got off lightly: all he got done for was £2700 fine, £15500 court costs, and the £40k profits he had made by illegally destroying the trees. That fine could have been £25k.
The interesting point here is not the amount but the fact that, as @MrBedfordshire mentioned, the council used POCA in a separate court case after the criminal trial and fine to seize further monies. I would suggest it sets a very dangerous precedent, whatever you might think about the actual case. Using this logic almost anything might be considered as falling under the scope of POCA.
Edit - it also seems very dodgy to me that they waited until 3 years after the original trial before pursuing him under POCA.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
Becca Lyon from @savechildrenuk : "It's an outrage 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year
“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families facing hardship and destitution".
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
And then you woke up.
And yet that is what Rolls Royce are working on right now.
Becca Lyon from @savechildrenuk : "It's an outrage 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year
“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families facing hardship and destitution".
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
Sorry but that's just 100% categorically untrue in every way.
The UK has taken a lead on green technologies which is why China investing in renewables to cut its coal power down to 53% is about a decade and a bit behind the UK. The UK gets a far, far larger proportion of its power from clean power than China does. The UK has never been waiting for China.
No thanks to the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power for power generation.
Rather late on this, but does anyone else not give two figs for poor old Ronald Koeman's complaints about VAR? If VAR had been in use in 1993 he'd have been red carded and seen England awarded a penalty.
England has endured more than its share of poor decisions over the years. The one you mention, the Hand of God goal, Lampard's goal disallowed, and so on. This time one went our way. We'll take it.
And before anyone mentions Russian linesmen, remember the second German goal was dodgy too.
Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
Many years ago, when I was MD of a small business I was asked to consider employing someone who had been, especially as a pharmacy student, incredibly stupid with addictive drugs. I was all for it, but my colleague, who would have to work closely with the chap, was dead against it. I sometimes wonder how everything would have turned out if my colleague had been a bit more ‘forgiving’.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
The relationship between China and the UK on renewables is perhaps largely irrelevant. Neither influences the other a massive amount.
The influence of the Chinese energy transition on how the global South develops without massive increases in emissions is really important though. Starting with India.
I don't think that's true. The influence of China on global prices for both solar panels and batteries is immense. If we rely on increasing amounts of wind power, it will be partly thanks to cheap storage - and with the rate battery prices are falling, that's likely to be the dominant storage technology.
China massively subsidised its renewable industries entirely out of calculated self-interest, but that doesn't mean that won't indirectly benefit the rest of the world.
China subsidised its industries out of self-interest. America subsidises its industries out of self-interest. Britain is run by naive idiots who think everyone else is playing straight Adam Smith rules, and has been since at least the 1980s.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
The opposition to them is interesting - quite a bit of cross over with the permanent officials preventing tidal ponds. Big Nuclear really doesn't like them.
The advantages of the small reactors are
1) Type certification - once you have the design certified, no amusing decade long investigations of the individual designs. 2) Experience - we have companies making and installing small reactors now. Submarines. The SMRs are a slightly bigger and more powerful version of those. Basically the size of the reactors the Americans use in their aircraft carriers. Which are derived from their submarine reactors. And there is a lot of joint design work on US/UK reactors. 3) Installation/Scaling - instead of having decades of construction, the individual SMRs can be trucked to the site (probably old nuclear plant) and individually brought on line.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
They're never going to, but those of us who've been strongly advocating renewables have got our wish, the UK is far down the path of renewables. A genuine world leader and China is following us, not in the lead.
No thanks to Greens who oppose investment in renewables.
The last thing the Tories need is Reform voters. Their views are extreme.
The ideal for the Conservatives is to get the votes of Reform backers without turning into Reform themselves. Partly because it would be bad government, but also because there are still more votes to lose on their left flank.
Unfortunately, that's not easy to do. The best way would have been to strangle them at birth, but it's about twenty years too later for that.
Do you mean by attempting to deceive them by putting a few right wing bones in the manifesto you have no intention of implementing (the norm)?
Which no longer works.
Or actually addressing the problem which means both building a lot more houses on nimby members prized view and stopping immigration to the extent that there is net migration to facilitate a house price collapase so that under 40s can get somewhere to live without paying an extortionate amount?
All of which is anathema to the wealthy vested interests controlling the party.
How stupid can you be, anyone facilitating a house price collapse would be out on their arses tout suite. Typical selfish arseholes wanting to bankrupt lots of people because they want everything for nothing. Get out and earn enough to buy a house you sad sick loser.
A house price collapse doesn't bankrupt anyone, it just makes costs more affordable. If you've been paying off your mortgage (or paid it off) you owe less or nothing on your home already, it's those who need to buy one we should be caring about not those who already have one.
Costs going up is a bad thing, costs going down is a good thing. Or do you want gas prices and other costs to only ever go up?
The only people who lose big time are.
Those that inherit. Investors/Landlords with multiple properties. The government if the owner goes into care as the self funded money runs out quicker.
Excess asset price inflation is just as corrosive to society as any other type of inflation. It is at the root of most of the ills that currently bedevill our society.
People who need to sell e.g. because they change jobs, also lose big time. At the start of the 90s there were lots of people who wanted to move but could not do so because the market was stagnant.
No, because they will likey get something bigger so pay proportionally less for the new place and better off.
Negative equity is something that affects a proportion of sellers (but should be fixable if they are selling then buying by transferrable mortgages - not beyond the wit of man).
Those who buy at the peak and get negative equity I have great sympathy for.
Those who use their house as a cash machine by remortgaging when the value goes up for a higher mortgage for more money to spend, rather less sympathy.
Transferrable mortgages were very much a thing in Northern Ireland when the Irish HPC impacted them - it wasn't a problem..
They still are a thing (usually referred to as portable mortgages) - prices are still slightly below the 2007 peak. Pretty much every lender who operates in the NI market will offer them, with very few restrictions on acceptance or on increasing the amount borrowed.
Rather late on this, but does anyone else not give two figs for poor old Ronald Koeman's complaints about VAR? If VAR had been in use in 1993 he'd have been red carded and seen England awarded a penalty.
England has endured more than its share of poor decisions over the years. The one you mention, the Hand of God goal, Lampard's goal disallowed, and so on. This time one went our way. We'll take it.
And before anyone mentions Russian linesmen, remember the second German goal was dodgy too.
As I’ve mentioned upthread, I’m no expert on football, but ‘sin-binning’ does seem to have advantages.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
And then you woke up.
And yet that is what Rolls Royce are working on right now.
People are working on all sorts of things. This does not mean they are automatically going to solve all our problems or even have much chance of becoming commercially practicable within a useful time frame.
There is an urgent need to decarbonise our electricity production, and we already know how to do it: through a combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation combined with storage and demand management. These are what we need to focus on. We simply don't have time left to rely on the pie-in-the-sky stuff.
Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.
The Poles I know (mostly liberal) are absolute in their support for a huge army and airforce. A specific mention is that Poland should ally with neighbouring countries in this, so that the Eastern Europe runs the defence policy of the EU - specifically that the Germans and French need to be relegated (at least) to equal partners. In turn this (they say) should mean that the foreign policy of the EU stops being run by Germany.
If anyone really thinks the Tory party will have the sense not to elect Badenoch leader, they can make a killing by betting against her.
But does anyone believe that?
Well the Conservative members might vote for Braverman over her granted.
However it is not impossible Tory MPs only put say Tugendhat and Cleverly in the last 2 to members
That would be a smart move if the PCP can wangle it. Kemi and Suella are both clearly useless, and this schoolgirl-style bitching between them is both boring and deeply unedifying.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
And then you woke up.
And yet that is what Rolls Royce are working on right now.
People are working on all sorts of things. This does not mean they are automatically going to solve all our problems or even have much chance of becoming commercially practicable within a useful time frame.
There is an urgent need to decarbonise our electricity production, and we already know how to do it: through a combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation combined with storage and demand management. These are what we need to focus on. We simply don't have time left to rely on the pie-in-the-sky stuff.
And we're already doing it.
The UK has already eliminated coal.
The UK is well down the path to eliminating gas too now.
It'll take time to finish the job, and we need to invest especially in pylons and have the rollout of batteries/EVs continue (which are becoming cheaper year on year) but we're doing the right thing already and need to just keep calm and carry on with it.
And encourage the likes of China to belatedly catch up with us. Which they're not doing yet.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
And then you woke up.
And yet that is what Rolls Royce are working on right now.
People are working on all sorts of things. This does not mean they are automatically going to solve all our problems or even have much chance of becoming commercially practicable within a useful time frame.
There is an urgent need to decarbonise our electricity production, and we already know how to do it: through a combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation combined with storage and demand management. These are what we need to focus on. We simply don't have time left to rely on the pie-in-the-sky stuff.
1 Thinking we can get 100% of our energy supply 100% reliably 100% of the time from wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation is pie in the sky. 2. It is actually possible for a country to pursue more than one possible solution to a problem at the same time. Indeed that is what we have been doing for the last few decades. The trouble is that vested interest have meant we have ignored some of the important contributors (tidal power, small nuclear) in favour of the others (wind, solar and big nuclear).
We should be doing all this stuff simultaneously rather than pursuing your pie in the sky ideas.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
Sorry but that's just 100% categorically untrue in every way.
The UK has taken a lead on green technologies which is why China investing in renewables to cut its coal power down to 53% is about a decade and a bit behind the UK. The UK gets a far, far larger proportion of its power from clean power than China does. The UK has never been waiting for China.
No thanks to the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power for power generation.
You have no right to tell me that I'm a liar. Just because a majority of Green Party members are anti-nuclear, doesn't mean there haven't always been a strong minority willing to use the technology, or that Greens in general haven't advocated for investment in new technology.
How fucking dare you say that what I say about my own views is 100% untrue? What a miserable little shit you are.
Sunak and Hunt are serious people and have just left the Conservative party to its worst defeat in its history. I expect most Tory members and many Tory MPs will first be looking for a leader who can win back some voters who went to ReformUK while also holding onto almost all who stayed Conservative on 4th July.
Braverman may do the former but not the latter, Badenoch could do both. Tugendhat is a serious candidate who would hold most current Tory voters and maybe win back some lost to the LDs but he wouldn't win back any lost to Reform and could leak further to Farage
Whilst not disagreeing with your analysis of what each contender would achieve regarding lost voters to Reform and LDs I do think it unfair to blame Sunak and Hunt. I can't think of much Hunt did wrong and although Sunak led a poor campaign he was handed a hospital pass.
For me the blame lays squarely with Boris. I accept that the Tories were probably going to lose anyway after so long in power, but to lose so badly is down to Boris (and Boris came about because of Brexit).
On another note prior to the election you kept wanting to add Reform to the Tory count presuming they would come back to the fold and still believe Reform voters are ex Tories. Lots are, but lots aren't. They are disaffected voters from all parties. Something the LDs used to gain a lot from. During our (LD) knocking up in Guildford of 'Ours' and 'Probables' we came across a not inconsiderable number who voted Reform. So people who said they were voting LD in a LD target and went and voted Reform.
You can not add the Reform vote to the Tory count.
No they lost so badly because of Truss, it was her budget disaster and the consequent surge in interest rates and mortgage repayments that collapsed the Tories to around 20%. Under Boris even after partygate the Conservatives were still around 30%. Hence Truss lost her seat.
I disagree. You can't blame it all on Truss. It was an ongoing disaster. And why did Truss happen? Truss wouldn't have been an event if not for Boris. It is Boris that caused the scenario that allowed for the Truss disaster. It all goes back to Boris and Brexit. Yes the Tories would still have lost, just because, but he was the catalyst that started off the big decline.
Re the percentage you quote, these are misleading. The Tories dropped their vote from 2019 to 2024. They had to go somewhere. But these aren't Tories these are the floaters that when a party is doing well are picked up (Tories in 2019) and are lost when they are doing badly (Tories 2024). They don't belong to the Tories, they belong to whoever is popular at the time, or picking up the none of the other vote.
Had Boris remained PM Truss would never have become PM, Sunak would have stayed Chancellor not Kwarteng and the Conservatives would probably have got 30-35% on 4th July and over 200 seats.
The fact the vast majority of the Reform vote came from the Tories shows they are mainly rightwingers, certainly on social issues
Becca Lyon from @savechildrenuk : "It's an outrage 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year
“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families facing hardship and destitution".
I know this is a controversial take but don’t have kids if you cannot afford them.
Great, but that doesn't help the kid growing up in poverty who will likely end up costing the state much more than the savings from the two-child limit.
It's a bit like early release and employment for violent criminals. Feels wrong, but it's right. We need a government which can take a step back from a Daily Mail headline.
(Also - from what we can see from the nosediving TFR, very few couples consider kids affordable at the moment.)
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.
Do you have a linky for that last claim?
Did @MrBedfordshire back this claim up, of someone pruning a TPO Tree being bankrupted after being pursued under Proceeds of Crime law?
I'd really like to see it, as I have never seen POCA used wrt TPO trees, and it is in my area of interest. Getting permission to prune is not difficult, and is free, and we treat damaging TPO trees as an attack on the system of maintaining the public environment, which is what it is.
The closest I am aware of was a millionaire scrote on Sandbanks who added £40k to the value of his property by destroying two TPO trees.
He got off lightly: all he got done for was £2700 fine, £15500 court costs, and the £40k profits he had made by illegally destroying the trees. That fine could have been £25k.
The interesting point here is not the amount but the fact that, as @MrBedfordshire mentioned, the council used POCA in a separate court case after the criminal trial and fine to seize further monies. I would suggest it sets a very dangerous precedent, whatever you might think about the actual case. Using this logic almost anything might be considered as falling under the scope of POCA.
Edit - it also seems very dodgy to me that they waited until 3 years after the original trial before pursuing him under POCA.
I think that's appropriate, but probably inadequate.
This is a rich individual cynically breaking the law because he thinks he's too important to need to obey it. For me it's in the same category as a developer who burns down a listed building because he doesn't want it there in his way.
But I think it needs a heavier punishment than just depriving him of his illegal profits; that's not deterrent enough.
I think the guy should have had a prison sentence as well, pour encourager les autres and deterring anyone else from doing it.
The important point on POCA here is that it needs to be appropriately applied, which is a matter of checks and balances being correct.
Reflecting, I can think of a similar case reported in2023 where the landowner went to jail. There was a case near Leominster where a farmer destroyed 70 trees in an SSI and seriously damaged a long stretch of the River Legg.
He went to prison for 12 months, and was made to pay £1.2m. Repeat offender. At root he thinks it's HIS environment, when in reality it is OURS.
For these types of criminals, imo it's only jail that deters, because they think they are upstanding citizens.
Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.
Nothing in that thread changes the view that Biden has done a good job on Ukraine, constrained by Trump and his supporters like MTG's opposition to sending aid to Ukraine.
The Trump/MTG inspired shutdown of aid for months thanks to the GOP Congressional blockage is an utter disgrace that set Ukraine back. That the sane elements of the GOP eventually broke with Trump/MTG and supported Biden is to their credit and gives hope for a post-Trump future for the GOP.
Everyone who supports Ukraine should definitely be hoping Trump is trounced in November and that the likes of MTG are setback too.
Meanwhile the Red Tory SKS Party says "The NHS is no longer a public service...it's an economic growth department"
You need to understand that dogma is at the root of breaking the NHS and Streeting not only knows this but is addressing it directly and for the NHS to have a future he needs to succeed
But also, it's why getting healthcare right matters.
We've got to the point where waiting lists are a meaningful drag on the economy, and some spending in the right places will pay back pretty quickly.
Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.
It’s almost as if the closer your country is to Russia, the more scared you are of them.
The whole point of NATO is that everyone defends Russian expansionism.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
And then you woke up.
And yet that is what Rolls Royce are working on right now.
People are working on all sorts of things. This does not mean they are automatically going to solve all our problems or even have much chance of becoming commercially practicable within a useful time frame.
There is an urgent need to decarbonise our electricity production, and we already know how to do it: through a combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation combined with storage and demand management. These are what we need to focus on. We simply don't have time left to rely on the pie-in-the-sky stuff.
It's worth remembering that picking the winners often means picking the losers. Think batteries vs hydrogen.
The important thing to understand is that the theoretically "best" solution may actually be a failure, because of societal issues. Hydroelectric now means 20 years of planning enquiries. Offshore wind has the advantage that fish don't vote.
We are now seeing something similar with the build-out of battery storage accelerating. Under 30MW, IIRC, storage isn't be classed (legally) as a power station. So no decades of fun planning enquires. Instead some ISO containers on a piece of land.
The sane approach is multiple strands - then back what works.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
The opposition to them is interesting - quite a bit of cross over with the permanent officials preventing tidal ponds. Big Nuclear really doesn't like them.
The advantages of the small reactors are
1) Type certification - once you have the design certified, no amusing decade long investigations of the individual designs. 2) Experience - we have companies making and installing small reactors now. Submarines. The SMRs are a slightly bigger and more powerful version of those. Basically the size of the reactors the Americans use in their aircraft carriers. Which are derived from their submarine reactors. And there is a lot of joint design work on US/UK reactors. 3) Installation/Scaling - instead of having decades of construction, the individual SMRs can be trucked to the site (probably old nuclear plant) and individually brought on line.
This doesn't sound at all convincing to me. They still need a cooling water supply and need to be linked up to generation facilities. They still need to be refuelled at some point. You still need to dispose of the waste. They still need security. Having, say, four SMRs on a site inside of a single traditional core just seems to me to make the whole thing more complex. I'm very sceptical about this.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
Sorry but that's just 100% categorically untrue in every way.
The UK has taken a lead on green technologies which is why China investing in renewables to cut its coal power down to 53% is about a decade and a bit behind the UK. The UK gets a far, far larger proportion of its power from clean power than China does. The UK has never been waiting for China.
No thanks to the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power for power generation.
You have no right to tell me that I'm a liar. Just because a majority of Green Party members are anti-nuclear, doesn't mean there haven't always been a strong minority willing to use the technology, or that Greens in general haven't advocated for investment in new technology.
How fucking dare you say that what I say about my own views is 100% untrue? What a miserable little shit you are.
Also, as we can see from the polling, the number of people who would vote Green is much larger than what FPTP gives us. A very large proportion of the UK population consider the environment a key issue, stretching across traditional left:right bounds, with all the complexity that brings.
Look at me. I'm stridently against road pricing on a per mile basis and have engaged in a raging argument with my local Green councillor on the matter.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
Everything nuclear takes forever and costs loads more than planned. Or maybe everybody just lies at the start of the project to get it going. Either way, total dead end.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
Sorry but that's just 100% categorically untrue in every way.
The UK has taken a lead on green technologies which is why China investing in renewables to cut its coal power down to 53% is about a decade and a bit behind the UK. The UK gets a far, far larger proportion of its power from clean power than China does. The UK has never been waiting for China.
No thanks to the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power for power generation.
You have no right to tell me that I'm a liar. Just because a majority of Green Party members are anti-nuclear, doesn't mean there haven't always been a strong minority willing to use the technology, or that Greens in general haven't advocated for investment in new technology.
How fucking dare you say that what I say about my own views is 100% untrue? What a miserable little shit you are.
Get that stick out of your arse, I didn't say anything at all about your views.
I said that "the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power" are problematic.
Since you're in the minority of Greens who don't oppose development, that doesn't include you. But it does include your party and most of your parties MPs, voters and members.
The country has been doing the right thing for decades, despite opposition to the right thing by those Greens (not you) who are watermelons and oppose investing in clean technologies.
It'd be better if your views were your party and your elected MPs views - but they're not. You having good views makes no more difference to your party than BigG or DavidL having good views means the Tories were electable last week.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
Meanwhile the Red Tory SKS Party says "The NHS is no longer a public service...it's an economic growth department"
Why is this at all controversial?
“One of the things I’ve said to my department and to the NHS is that we need to rethink our role in Government and in our country at large – this is no longer simply a public services department, this is an economic growth department.
“The health of the nation and the health of the economy are inextricably linked.
“That means we’re going to be a Government that firstly recognises that fact, and recognises that as we get people not just back to health, but back to work, that’s a big contribution to growth as there are three million people who are off work off sick.
“As we focus with a bold agenda on public health and prevention… we will not only be enabling people to live well, and live well for longer, but to contribute more and to drive the economic growth of the country.”
The Big Problem in the NHS is the lack of joined up thinking/actions.
Great for the op to save your life after a road accident. Terrible at the physical and mental rehabilitation to get you back to your old life.
Big savings (and better outcomes) on preventing people needing medical treatment in the first place. Big savings possible with early testing and treatment that catches problems at the “take a pill stage” rather than the “long term hospitalisation stage” of an illness….
Are Labour brave enough to cut (or slow) hospital spending and re-direct it to primary care and public health?
*doubt*
It's the urgent/important thing again.
The current NHS capacity is enough to deal with urgent things sort-of-adequately. But there's very little capacity to deal with important things (like prevention and lifestyle), because one can't ignore the backlog in the urgent pile.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Imagine a small, safe, and cheap source of huge amounts of energy that could be run out of a production line, generating both clean power for the domestic market and £billions in exports. What a horrible problem to have, imagine how much economic growth could be driven by such technology.
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
But can he cut recidivism?
Just remembered the rt hon for Eddisbury was his brother. Timpson family politics clearly cut both ways
James Timpson's idea to incentivise employers to hire ex-offenders is genius. And he has the experience and expertise in such matters. This could be Sir Keir's key appointment.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
Will he be involved with the Triple Lock??
Get him focused on working out where the cuts will fall.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
The opposition to them is interesting - quite a bit of cross over with the permanent officials preventing tidal ponds. Big Nuclear really doesn't like them.
The advantages of the small reactors are
1) Type certification - once you have the design certified, no amusing decade long investigations of the individual designs. 2) Experience - we have companies making and installing small reactors now. Submarines. The SMRs are a slightly bigger and more powerful version of those. Basically the size of the reactors the Americans use in their aircraft carriers. Which are derived from their submarine reactors. And there is a lot of joint design work on US/UK reactors. 3) Installation/Scaling - instead of having decades of construction, the individual SMRs can be trucked to the site (probably old nuclear plant) and individually brought on line.
This doesn't sound at all convincing to me. They still need a cooling water supply and need to be linked up to generation facilities. They still need to be refuelled at some point. You still need to dispose of the waste. They still need security. Having, say, four SMRs on a site inside of a single traditional core just seems to me to make the whole thing more complex. I'm very sceptical about this.
Repetition of small standard items isn't complexity, it's simplicity surely? Consider the buttons on a shirt.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I'm still waiting for all those who argues a decade or so back that it was futile to subsidise renewables, as they'd never be economic, to admit that they've been proved wrong.
The obvious economic path for the UK was surely to be a world leader in green tech. Instead we got a decade of focusing on Brexit.
Industrial Strategies are not allowed to exist in Toryland.
But why? Is this some throwback to failed ones in the 70s (before my time). If so I'd suggest there is a big difference between protecting old industries and building new ones.
It very much is, I'm afraid. Another legacy of Thatcher, which has become embedded as an unrecognised dogma, rather than what was at the time a fairly pragmatic response to recent history.
If you asked Mrs T to explain (for example) South Korea today, she'd be somewhat flummoxed. Back in the 80s it was still a military dictatorship under General Chun Doo-hwan who led a coup in 1979. History has moved on; it's time we did too.
Everyone arguing that Britain shouldn't do anything about the climate until China does will now be supporting investment in renewable energy then?
China has dropped their coal consumption to 53% of power generation.
The UK has kept its coal consumption steady at 0% of power generation.
Are you sure you want Britain to do what China is doing?
I'm glad they've belatedly started to catch up with what we did decades ago, but lets not delude ourselves into thinking we're doing badly or they're doing better.
The conventional wisdom was that poor countries like China and India would have to produce absolutely loads of carbon before they could get rich and clean like us. This was essentially apocalyptic for the climate, and my lecturers were talking like Preppers - store baked beans and build houses on top of mountains.
That's happening to an extent as their population and economy explodes. However, they are doing significantly better than expected which is great source of happiness for everyone in the 20s and 30s. By the time Africa gets to this stage, solar will be so cheap they can transition to a developed economy with very little increase in emissions at all. Yaaas!
Well indeed, the solution to climate issues is science and technology, not cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Cutting consumption does absolutely nothing to improve the planet, as the rest of the planet intends to increase consumption not decrease it.
The way to solve climate problems is by ensuring we invest in clean consumption. Do so and you can have as much consumption as you like without hurting the planet (since anything times zero equals zero).
We can lead the way by investing in, developing and supporting clean technologies and the rest of the world will follow on that.
The madness of watermelon lunatics who pretend to be green but really just want to hurt people's consumption will do nothing for the environment.
Me and other Greens have been arguing for Britain to invest in new technology for decades, and people have told us we shouldn't do anything until China does.
Now China has done it and it's pretty much too late for Britain to take a lead on any of the relevant technology, because Britain let other countries get there first.
Just in the last year or two the opportunity to take a lead on small modular nuclear reactors has slipped through Britain's fingers. Unless Labour manage to dramatically turn this around, Britain will be paying other countries for the green energy technology they could have profited from.
So don't lecture me about green watermelons, thank you very much.
I thought the Greens opposed nuclear ?
Green party policy is anti-nuclear. Plenty of prominent Greens have been in favour. Some Greens have been equivocal, pointing out that nuclear is just too slow to build - something the small modular reactors might be better at.
I've heard Greens especially opposing the small modular reactors because it will be hard to stop them.
Hard to start them, more like. Despite all the hype, I've yet to see any economic or environmental benefits for SMRs or indeed any concrete proposals for their installation. As far as I can see, while they, like nuclear fusion, may become useful energy sources in the long-term future, in the meantime they are at best an irrelevance and, at worst, a distraction from the more urgent need to generate clean electricity.
The opposition to them is interesting - quite a bit of cross over with the permanent officials preventing tidal ponds. Big Nuclear really doesn't like them.
The advantages of the small reactors are
1) Type certification - once you have the design certified, no amusing decade long investigations of the individual designs. 2) Experience - we have companies making and installing small reactors now. Submarines. The SMRs are a slightly bigger and more powerful version of those. Basically the size of the reactors the Americans use in their aircraft carriers. Which are derived from their submarine reactors. And there is a lot of joint design work on US/UK reactors. 3) Installation/Scaling - instead of having decades of construction, the individual SMRs can be trucked to the site (probably old nuclear plant) and individually brought on line.
This doesn't sound at all convincing to me. They still need a cooling water supply and need to be linked up to generation facilities. They still need to be refuelled at some point. You still need to dispose of the waste. They still need security. Having, say, four SMRs on a site inside of a single traditional core just seems to me to make the whole thing more complex. I'm very sceptical about this.
The waste is the whole reactor. Probably go with lifetime cores - no refuelling. The actual radioactive bit is surprisingly small.
They will almost certainly be sited on old nuclear plant sites, many as replacements for the original reactors. So cooling water is available. And they can be guarded by Wayne Couzen's ex colleagues who are already there.
Many of the problems of nuclear are down to each reactor being a different design - production is how to refine a design to high availability and reliability. See the experience of the US Navy with their reactors.
Comments
Hang your head in shame
@AdamBienkov
·
35m
Becca Lyon from @savechildrenuk
: "It's an outrage 440,000 families are denied vital support because of the two-child limit, a rise of over 30,000 since last year
“The cruel two-child limit should be scrapped immediately to prevent families facing hardship and destitution".
https://x.com/AdamBienkov/status/1811327732908720210
You know that when a new boss takes over a company, they get all the bad news out in public at the first opportunity. Why do you expect the public sector to be different from the private ?
Families are 'desperately' downsizing so they can afford to keep children in private schools as Labour's tax raid looms, a leading estate agency boss has said.
Of course I would trust an Estate Agent, nothing to do with drumming up work. Makes a good header though.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/parents-downsizing-so-they-can-afford-labour-s-school-fee-hike/ar-BB1pLebh?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=7d984031a2564ccdbc48d3adad5e5fc0&ei=67
Switzerland started phasing out their £30 per annum insurance and decals from 2010/12 ish, because they assessed that the costs heavily outweighed any benefits.
We have a far better system in the UK, where for most people (not sure of exact number) 3rd Party insurance for cycling comes free with House Contents Insurance for the whole household. There has been quite a bit of fairly low profile social media campaigning pointing it out, and a lot of trolls have dropped this particular "but insurance..." red herring from their portfolio. Here is one of the charts I have been using for my daily photo.
I would love to see some formal research done, because goons like Lord Hogan-Howe were wasting House of Lords type stirring this up as recently as last month.
My tweet:
https://x.com/mattwardman/status/1628327909906608129
Reeves has been spouting twaddle for the last week and rather than convince me at any rate. I now think she's a bit shifty, The UK undoubtedly has problems but its a mixed picture. Growth, inflation looking better than expected public finances a mess. But she cant give a balanced view because she needs to tax the arse of everyone rather than cut spending.
Gordon Brown in a dress I fear.
I do think the insurance for cyclists point is a good one and if cyclist haters on social media ranting that we need insurance raises awareness that most of us already have it and also gets cyclists to check their position on it all well and good.
I have to have public liability for various public facing things I do including, for example, running events like open days or meetings. Generally this is in the low hundreds of pounds a year premium. How does this compare with the average person's house and contents insurance?
And there's also at least one trade union that has it as a standard benefit iirc.
In my more mischievous moments I want cycling insurance to be a compulsory inclusion in all motor insurance policies, just to annoy Howard Cox.
Hungarian PM’s freelance diplomacy sparked condemnation from European and Nato allies
https://www.ft.com/content/81b1ccc4-e1af-4e34-a551-a05faad1f6e1
There would also be exclusions around damage caused whilst doing a dangerous sport etc.
Last night's ref controlled the game well, although he made a few mistakes (but not the penalty.) I seethe still over the Brazilian ref who took the England/France game in Qatar. He gave every marginal decision to France, so you knew he was crooked.
Mistakes you can live with, dishonesty should never be forgotten or forgiven.
Re the percentage you quote, these are misleading. The Tories dropped their vote from 2019 to 2024. They had to go somewhere. But these aren't Tories these are the floaters that when a party is doing well are picked up (Tories in 2019) and are lost when they are doing badly (Tories 2024). They don't belong to the Tories, they belong to whoever is popular at the time, or picking up the none of the other vote.
It's no wonder that people are able to avoid admitting mistakes, when the web provides such a plethora of facts to choose from.
1. It is a penalty under the laws of the game (it's a certain foul anywhere else on the pitch).
2. I would have been furious had it been given against England.
3. Kane probably wasn't put off by the tackle.
All of these things can be, and are, true simultaneously.
One way I have learned to reconcile these matters is that if you allow a striker into your penalty area and attempt to tackle him, you are risking a penalty, pure and simple. If you don't want to concede a penalty don't let him breach your 18-yard box.
I'd really like to see it, as I have never seen POCA used wrt TPO trees, and it is in my area of interest. Getting permission to prune is not difficult, and is free, and we treat damaging TPO trees as an attack on the system of maintaining the public environment, which is what it is.
The closest I am aware of was a millionaire scrote on Sandbanks who added £40k to the value of his property by destroying two TPO trees.
He got off lightly: all he got done for was £2700 fine, £15500 court costs, and the £40k profits he had made by illegally destroying the trees. That fine could have been £25k.
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/17933907.millionaire-chopped-protected-trees-outside-1-2m-sandbanks-home-fined-60k/
Half the Board of EDF resigning before the decision to proceed was taken should have sounded alarm bells with government. But the last government was sat so snugly in nuclear's lower intestine. Hopefully this government is significantly more curious about value for money.
(Yes, I know, I know.)
Labour 412 seats.
There are lots of options. Rebalancing costs whilst alive vs IHT so that oldsters rattling around in 4 and 5 bed houses were incentivised to downsize earlier rather than wait until they pop their clogs for the IHT exemption would be a start for one track.
What happened to @Mexicanpete ? Is he still predicting a 1992-style Tory shock win with the certainty of the tides on here every bloody night?
The interesting point here is not the amount but the fact that, as @MrBedfordshire mentioned, the council used POCA in a separate court case after the criminal trial and fine to seize further monies. I would suggest it sets a very dangerous precedent, whatever you might think about the actual case. Using this logic almost anything might be considered as falling under the scope of POCA.
Edit - it also seems very dodgy to me that they waited until 3 years after the original trial before pursuing him under POCA.
But does anyone believe that?
The UK has taken a lead on green technologies which is why China investing in renewables to cut its coal power down to 53% is about a decade and a bit behind the UK. The UK gets a far, far larger proportion of its power from clean power than China does. The UK has never been waiting for China.
No thanks to the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power for power generation.
And before anyone mentions Russian linesmen, remember the second German goal was dodgy too.
https://x.com/mattlightcrim/status/1811148681229255031
Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.
I sometimes wonder how everything would have turned out if my colleague had been a bit more ‘forgiving’.
The advantages of the small reactors are
1) Type certification - once you have the design certified, no amusing decade long investigations of the individual designs.
2) Experience - we have companies making and installing small reactors now. Submarines. The SMRs are a slightly bigger and more powerful version of those. Basically the size of the reactors the Americans use in their aircraft carriers. Which are derived from their submarine reactors. And there is a lot of joint design work on US/UK reactors.
3) Installation/Scaling - instead of having decades of construction, the individual SMRs can be trucked to the site (probably old nuclear plant) and individually brought on line.
No thanks to Greens who oppose investment in renewables.
However it is not impossible Tory MPs only put say Tugendhat and Cleverly in the last 2 to members
There is an urgent need to decarbonise our electricity production, and we already know how to do it: through a combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric and traditional nuclear generation combined with storage and demand management. These are what we need to focus on. We simply don't have time left to rely on the pie-in-the-sky stuff.
The UK has already eliminated coal.
The UK is well down the path to eliminating gas too now.
It'll take time to finish the job, and we need to invest especially in pylons and have the rollout of batteries/EVs continue (which are becoming cheaper year on year) but we're doing the right thing already and need to just keep calm and carry on with it.
And encourage the likes of China to belatedly catch up with us. Which they're not doing yet.
2. It is actually possible for a country to pursue more than one possible solution to a problem at the same time. Indeed that is what we have been doing for the last few decades. The trouble is that vested interest have meant we have ignored some of the important contributors (tidal power, small nuclear) in favour of the others (wind, solar and big nuclear).
We should be doing all this stuff simultaneously rather than pursuing your pie in the sky ideas.
How fucking dare you say that what I say about my own views is 100% untrue? What a miserable little shit you are.
The fact the vast majority of the Reform vote came from the Tories shows they are mainly rightwingers, certainly on social issues
It's a bit like early release and employment for violent criminals. Feels wrong, but it's right. We need a government which can take a step back from a Daily Mail headline.
(Also - from what we can see from the nosediving TFR, very few couples consider kids affordable at the moment.)
https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1811085407486091410
This is a rich individual cynically breaking the law because he thinks he's too important to need to obey it. For me it's in the same category as a developer who burns down a listed building because he doesn't want it there in his way.
But I think it needs a heavier punishment than just depriving him of his illegal profits; that's not deterrent enough.
I think the guy should have had a prison sentence as well, pour encourager les autres and deterring anyone else from doing it.
The important point on POCA here is that it needs to be appropriately applied, which is a matter of checks and balances being correct.
Reflecting, I can think of a similar case reported in2023 where the landowner went to jail. There was a case near Leominster where a farmer destroyed 70 trees in an SSI and seriously damaged a long stretch of the River Legg.
He went to prison for 12 months, and was made to pay £1.2m. Repeat offender. At root he thinks it's HIS environment, when in reality it is OURS.
For these types of criminals, imo it's only jail that deters, because they think they are upstanding citizens.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11996319/Farmer-hired-diggers-illegally-rip-trees-bank-River-Lugg-jailed-12-months.html
The Trump/MTG inspired shutdown of aid for months thanks to the GOP Congressional blockage is an utter disgrace that set Ukraine back. That the sane elements of the GOP eventually broke with Trump/MTG and supported Biden is to their credit and gives hope for a post-Trump future for the GOP.
Everyone who supports Ukraine should definitely be hoping Trump is trounced in November and that the likes of MTG are setback too.
We've got to the point where waiting lists are a meaningful drag on the economy, and some spending in the right places will pay back pretty quickly.
The whole point of NATO is that everyone defends Russian expansionism.
The important thing to understand is that the theoretically "best" solution may actually be a failure, because of societal issues. Hydroelectric now means 20 years of planning enquiries. Offshore wind has the advantage that fish don't vote.
We are now seeing something similar with the build-out of battery storage accelerating. Under 30MW, IIRC, storage isn't be classed (legally) as a power station. So no decades of fun planning enquires. Instead some ISO containers on a piece of land.
The sane approach is multiple strands - then back what works.
Look at me. I'm stridently against road pricing on a per mile basis and have engaged in a raging argument with my local Green councillor on the matter.
I said that "the Greens who consistently oppose nuclear and even wind power" are problematic.
Since you're in the minority of Greens who don't oppose development, that doesn't include you. But it does include your party and most of your parties MPs, voters and members.
The country has been doing the right thing for decades, despite opposition to the right thing by those Greens (not you) who are watermelons and oppose investing in clean technologies.
It'd be better if your views were your party and your elected MPs views - but they're not. You having good views makes no more difference to your party than BigG or DavidL having good views means the Tories were electable last week.
The current NHS capacity is enough to deal with urgent things sort-of-adequately. But there's very little capacity to deal with important things (like prevention and lifestyle), because one can't ignore the backlog in the urgent pile.
TLDR: I wouldn't start from here if I were you.
Another legacy of Thatcher, which has become embedded as an unrecognised dogma, rather than what was at the time a fairly pragmatic response to recent history.
If you asked Mrs T to explain (for example) South Korea today, she'd be somewhat flummoxed. Back in the 80s it was still a military dictatorship under General Chun Doo-hwan who led a coup in 1979.
History has moved on; it's time we did too.
They will almost certainly be sited on old nuclear plant sites, many as replacements for the original reactors. So cooling water is available. And they can be guarded by Wayne Couzen's ex colleagues who are already there.
Many of the problems of nuclear are down to each reactor being a different design - production is how to refine a design to high availability and reliability. See the experience of the US Navy with their reactors.
Figures for the final quarter of 2023, published on 1 February 2024, showed an average weekly audience of 430,000.
But they appear to watch it for approximately one minute per day.