Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
I just buy smashed oats (tesco scottish porridge oats) - link below, put them into a bowl and add boiling water, stir and a sprinkling of water on top.
Tried various other brands oats but most were a bit too tough. The tesco ones are perfect
I originally mixed in powdered milk until it got too expensive/difficult to source in the plague scare and found it made little difference to the taste.
It is basically the same as just add water pots or sachets of porridge but a tenth of the price
Jenrick personally ordered the painting over of cartoons such as Mickey Mouse and The Jungle Book's Baloo because they were “too welcoming” to the children. I cannot forgive Jenrick his meanness and It's affected my betting I'm afraid. I try not to be emotional in my betting but I can't help it with this one.
If Jenrick becomes Tory leader, this will haunt him and the party. Good for Labour and the LibDems so silver lining.
But what sort of oaf would conceive and do something like that anyway?
Jenrick doesn't need to prove he can apologise; weasel words to the press and public are a more basic skill than wiping his own bottom; he needs to prove that he has unfruitlooped his brain and obtained some decent personal values from somewhere.
The more important question: is the man human, yet?
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
So he was a politically interested teenager - its not that unusual.
Sunset Times front page reporting that Labour might scrap HS2 between Euston and Old Oak to help pay for hotels for illegal immigrants and inflation busting public sector rises £20 billion gap in finances the Tories left
Hopefully that's just a start to scrapping the whole misbegotten project. Building an absurdly expensive railway from somewhere near central Birmingham without any real links to a desolate part of west London is the biggest waste of money since the London Olympics. It may have made sense at £30 billion, it's crazy at £70 billion or £100 billion or whatever the current guess is - by far the most expensive rail line in the world per mile I think. Unless of course the idea is to show the rest of the world that we can do disastrously overrunning white elephants with no coherent business case.
We should leave that honour to the Californians and spend our money on something more useful, like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo Line extension, or even, shock, giving taxpayers a break.
The birmingham branch is just a nice to have bolt on.
The core route is Euston to Lichfield.
The main (unspoken) reason it is being built is to provide an extra pair pf tracks between Euston and Lichfield to allow more commuter trains to run between Euston and Rugby due to three huge new towns being built on the route (Hemel, MK and Northampton), also to fit some more goods trains on it.
(Compare the number of trains per hour in Rush Hour stopping at Northampton and Bedford and you get the picture and start to understand why commuter train overcrowding is epic on that line (to the extent that large numbers of people drive from places like Northampton and Daventry down the M1 to Flitwick and Harlington instead)
However, for it to work it needs to go to Euston. Terminating it at Wormwood Scrubs Parkway turns the whole thing into a white elephant, unless your nearest and dearest are incarcerated there, in which case it is quite handy.
You know they already double-tracked this route about 10 or 15 years ago, causing huge disruption?
The ECML upgrade system had three main objectives: *) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH; *) A new signalling system. *) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Alberto Costa MP for South Leicestershire told BBC Radio Leicester "I've just been re-elected and I promise the people of South Leicestershire this, I will ensure that the Conservative Party reflects and goes forward in the right direction and if that means I stand for leadership, I will do so "
Rumours locally are that he has decided not to stand as Theresa Coffey lost her seat and can't stand with him on a joint ticket.
I would have thought Theresa Coffey was more of an encumbrance than benefit.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Sunset Times front page reporting that Labour might scrap HS2 between Euston and Old Oak to help pay for hotels for illegal immigrants and inflation busting public sector rises £20 billion gap in finances the Tories left
Hopefully that's just a start to scrapping the whole misbegotten project. Building an absurdly expensive railway from somewhere near central Birmingham without any real links to a desolate part of west London is the biggest waste of money since the London Olympics. It may have made sense at £30 billion, it's crazy at £70 billion or £100 billion or whatever the current guess is - by far the most expensive rail line in the world per mile I think. Unless of course the idea is to show the rest of the world that we can do disastrously overrunning white elephants with no coherent business case.
We should leave that honour to the Californians and spend our money on something more useful, like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo Line extension, or even, shock, giving taxpayers a break.
The birmingham branch is just a nice to have bolt on.
The core route is Euston to Lichfield.
The main (unspoken) reason it is being built is to provide an extra pair pf tracks between Euston and Lichfield to allow more commuter trains to run between Euston and Rugby due to three huge new towns being built on the route (Hemel, MK and Northampton), also to fit some more goods trains on it.
(Compare the number of trains per hour in Rush Hour stopping at Northampton and Bedford and you get the picture and start to understand why commuter train overcrowding is epic on that line (to the extent that large numbers of people drive from places like Northampton and Daventry down the M1 to Flitwick and Harlington instead)
However, for it to work it needs to go to Euston. Terminating it at Wormwood Scrubs Parkway turns the whole thing into a white elephant, unless your nearest and dearest are incarcerated there, in which case it is quite handy.
You know they already double-tracked this route about 10 or 15 years ago, causing huge disruption?
The ECML upgrade system had three main objectives: *) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH; *) A new signalling system. *) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
The WCML “upgrade” is the best advert for doing HS2 as a brand new line. It was horrendously disruptive at the time, and delivered a fraction of what it was supposed to for many times the cost.
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
How is he still around?
I remember reading Irwin Stelzer and David Smith’s Sunday Times columns every week for Economics A-level tutorial class in, checks notes, 1995.
Well, he was only 16 in 1948. So a little precocious.
Alberto Costa MP for South Leicestershire told BBC Radio Leicester "I've just been re-elected and I promise the people of South Leicestershire this, I will ensure that the Conservative Party reflects and goes forward in the right direction and if that means I stand for leadership, I will do so "
Rumours locally are that he has decided not to stand as Theresa Coffey lost her seat and can't stand with him on a joint ticket.
I would have thought Theresa Coffey was more of an encumbrance than benefit.
“The Liberal Democrats have admitted discriminating against a mother who was barred from standing as an MP after wearing a T-shirt reading: “Woman: Adult, Human, Female.”
“Natalie Bird, 43, says she was suspended from the party after being “harrassed” and “smeared” by activists because she fought for women’s rights and expressed her opinion that it is not possible for a person to change sex.
“After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, the party admitted Ms Bird’s claims at the 11th hour before the trial was due to begin next month.
“Ms Bird said that her treatment and that of other gender-critical women shows that the Lib Dems have a “women problem” and have questions to answer about why they took so long to admit discriminating against her.
“A costs hearing at which she is expected to be awarded thousands in damages is due to be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice next month.”
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
Nowt wrong with that. I predicted Kinnock would beat Thatcher when I was 16. I was wrong, mind you, but being 16 doesn’t stop you making political predictions. In fact it’s when a lot of people start.
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Yes. I like the Titanic analogy. It feels like the stupid inept captains and senior officers of the Titanic have been replaced, but instead of dramatically changing course to avoid the iceberg, it’s full steam ahead but paint the limited lifeboats with pride flags and ensure there’s a vegan offering in the 2nd class buffet. And forbid the use of the word “iceberg”
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
So he was a politically interested teenager - its not that unusual.
It had better be the norm if the voting age is going to be lowered.
Things are looking pretty good in America, not far off "who is this Trump guy anyway?" The Dem supporters there and here pushing the don't be beastly to Joe line must feel a bit silly.
AIUI they spent a billion building a big interceptor reservoir upstream, but it is not large enough to cope with heavy rainfall - as they've just had. All in all, it seems like the project was a little shit, causing a lot of shit in the river.
Compare and contrast to the £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel, which I'd argue was doing the job properly.
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
It's because some on the far left hate their own country; and if Putin is our enemy, he must be on the side of good.
Just as they did during the Cold War. See also their support for Venezuela.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Yes. I like the Titanic analogy. It feels like the stupid inept captains and senior officers of the Titanic have been replaced, but instead of dramatically changing course to avoid the iceberg, it’s full steam ahead but paint the limited lifeboats with pride flags and ensure there’s a vegan offering in the 2nd class buffet. And forbid the use of the word “iceberg”
Yes, alas the bridge is controlled by the Office of Direction and Speed Responsibility and they can do nothing until a member resigns. Even then they will have to have a good reason not to appoint who the independent appointments committee recommends or face judicial review. So they do what they can which is stick pride flags all over the lifeboats and make the steerage canteen vegan only (because they know what is good for the Oiks and they can't afford clever lawyers to challenge it).
AIUI they spent a billion building a big interceptor reservoir upstream, but it is not large enough to cope with heavy rainfall - as they've just had. All in all, it seems like the project was a little shit, causing a lot of shit in the river.
Compare and contrast to the £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel, which I'd argue was doing the job properly.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Rachel will be addressing parliament tomorrow to ram home the claim that the Tories have murdered the British economy through a mixture of incompetence, venality, doltishness and greed. I suspect Labour intends this to be the reset button. Thereafter the Starmer Revolution will go supernova, with whole chunks of the old setup either swept away or reconfigured beyond recognition. For decades to come the face of Sir Keir will loom omnipresently over the British way of life like the Sun. Hold on to your hats!
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
“The Liberal Democrats have admitted discriminating against a mother who was barred from standing as an MP after wearing a T-shirt reading: “Woman: Adult, Human, Female.”
“Natalie Bird, 43, says she was suspended from the party after being “harrassed” and “smeared” by activists because she fought for women’s rights and expressed her opinion that it is not possible for a person to change sex.
“After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, the party admitted Ms Bird’s claims at the 11th hour before the trial was due to begin next month.
“Ms Bird said that her treatment and that of other gender-critical women shows that the Lib Dems have a “women problem” and have questions to answer about why they took so long to admit discriminating against her.
“A costs hearing at which she is expected to be awarded thousands in damages is due to be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice next month.”
Remember they're bought & paid for on the topic:
"Puberty-blocker drug firm donated cash to Lib Dems"
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
Nowt wrong with that. I predicted Kinnock would beat Thatcher when I was 16. I was wrong, mind you, but being 16 doesn’t stop you making political predictions. In fact it’s when a lot of people start.
I made my first political projection and indeed my first political bet around that age. I bet £50 that the first Gulf War would take less than a year against a school friend who was sure it would last two. For a teenager in 1990 that was serious money. I thought about six weeks for the air war and a week for the ground war, or 2-3 weeks if we had to clear Kuwait City street by street.
I've been wrong about lots of other things since but that prediction, gained from my studies of the American and NATO militaries in magazines like War Machine and computer games like F-19, turned out OK.
It taught me that when somebody gets really emotional about something they don't understand it's a great time to bet against them.
Oh and my friend never paid. I still bring it up occasionally when he's too sure about his opinions, and he's one of those people who usually is.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Rachel will be addressing parliament tomorrow to ram home the claim that the Tories have murdered the British economy through a mixture of incompetence, venality, doltishness and greed. I suspect Labour intends this to be the reset button. Thereafter the Starmer Revolution will go supernova, with whole chunks of the old setup either swept away or reconfigured beyond recognition. For decades to come the face of Sir Keir will loom omnipresently over the British way of life like the Sun. Hold on to your hats!
Not unless they fillet the human rights, equality and climate change acts for starters. Otherwise anything they try to do will get bogged down in consuptations, reports, legal challenges and other chaos with barely a spade in the ground by the next election.
All the signs are though that they will double down on such sacred texts.
Government spending was £1,189 billion in 2023-24. Complaining about about £20 billion (1.6%) of that on that is "look over there" distraction, which won't work unless they materially improve things.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Yes. I like the Titanic analogy. It feels like the stupid inept captains and senior officers of the Titanic have been replaced, but instead of dramatically changing course to avoid the iceberg, it’s full steam ahead but paint the limited lifeboats with pride flags and ensure there’s a vegan offering in the 2nd class buffet. And forbid the use of the word “iceberg”
A Trump like figure will emerge promising to save the day. They will come out with obvious, common sense policies our political class has been unable to think of/
IE we are not following the ECHR rules 'for a bit' while we sort out small boats We're going to 'have a break' from taking in new asylum seekers while we sort out the current situation.
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
Do we have a cite for that?
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
Nowt wrong with that. I predicted Kinnock would beat Thatcher when I was 16. I was wrong, mind you, but being 16 doesn’t stop you making political predictions. In fact it’s when a lot of people start.
I made my first political projection and indeed my first political bet around that age. I bet £50 that the first Gulf War would take less than a year against a school friend who was sure it would last two. For a teenager in 1990 that was serious money. I thought about six weeks for the air war and a week for the ground war, or 2-3 weeks if we had to clear Kuwait City street by street.
I've been wrong about lots of other things since but that prediction, gained from my studies of the American and NATO militaries in magazines like War Machine and computer games like F-19, turned out OK.
Oh and my friend never paid. I still bring it up occasionally when he's too sure about his opinions, and he's one of those people who usually is.
It’s easier to be sure of your opinions when you don’t back them with cash!
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
Several decades ago, myself and two friends - both rail workers - sat down in a pub and spitballed the best way to cause a mass casualty event on the railway. It's frighteningly easy - what we came up with eventually was something like the Stonehaven incident. A big issue was timing it for the 'right' trains - ones going fast, and preferably at a point where two or three trains cross in close succession.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Yes. I like the Titanic analogy. It feels like the stupid inept captains and senior officers of the Titanic have been replaced, but instead of dramatically changing course to avoid the iceberg, it’s full steam ahead but paint the limited lifeboats with pride flags and ensure there’s a vegan offering in the 2nd class buffet. And forbid the use of the word “iceberg”
A Trump like figure will emerge promising to save the day. They will come out with obvious, common sense policies our political class has been unable to think of/
IE we are not following the ECHR rules 'for a bit' while we sort out small boats We're going to 'have a break' from taking in new asylum seekers while we sort out the current situation.
.....
etc
He is already sitting on the opposition benches with four colleages, giving thanks to the Almighty that he got his core team in but didn't get a lot of paper candidates in who would cause chaos.
It isn't that the political class hasn't been able to think about them, its that their previous legislation and the standing bodies it brought into life prevents them from doing it and they view the idea of repealing such legislation with much the same distate as receiving a pair of used socks from Leon in the post.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
AIUI they spent a billion building a big interceptor reservoir upstream, but it is not large enough to cope with heavy rainfall - as they've just had. All in all, it seems like the project was a little shit, causing a lot of shit in the river.
Compare and contrast to the £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel, which I'd argue was doing the job properly.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
They don't object to the theory and practice of the last Conservative government, they just want to do it more efficiently.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
Their poll rating will collapse in 12-18 months as everyone realises Labour hasn’t got a clue what to do except tax more, and allow in more migrants and asylum seekers
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure) and ensuring the other single points of failure are in very secure compounds.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
The sad ‘legacy’ of most Olympics is a whole load of expensive white elephant venues that never get used afterwards. Rio and Athens were particularly bad in this regard. At least a general purpose arena has more uses afterwards, as opposed to a massive pool in a city that has several already. IIRC a lot of the venues are partially temporary, and get downsized after the Games are over the IOC are finally realising that they need to do something about the cost of hosting the Games, after the next two were awarded by default and the list of countries wanting to host in 2036 doesn’t include many democracies.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
The sad ‘legacy’ of most Olympics is a whole load of expensive white elephant venues that never get used afterwards. Rio and Athens were particularly bad in this regard. At least a general purpose arena has more uses afterwards, as opposed to a massive pool in a city that has several already. IIRC a lot of the venues are partially temporary, and get downsized after the Games are over.
I believe Montreal was the worst. Left the city bankrupt for many years
I visited the city decades later and the locals were STILL angry about it
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
Clearly beneficial to Harris is that her gender, colour and relative youth will prove attractive to women, black and younger voters who have been loosening their ties to the Democratic Party. But there is more than that going on in America — a kind of background music I heard when I predicted Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey in 1948. At the time, experts were so confident of a Dewey victory that before the votes were tallied, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman”.
This time around, the message I’m getting is that what puts Harris in pole position (pun intended) is a weariness with the Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade, which makes almost any change seem better than a continuation of the politics of the recent past. And makes a not-yet 60-year-old woman in the White House seem preferable to an octogenarian veteran of the nasty politics of the past decade, reading from his 2016 playbook and unable to lower his high dudgeon sufficiently to bring women and college-educated voters to his side, despite his considerable achievements when last in power.
This aligns with Haley's prediction that the winner would be the first party to get rid of its geriatric.
I think that's more because of his "considerable" achievements.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
The problem is that they are not hiding it or Lying. They actually agree that high regulation technocratic solutions work.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
Their poll rating will collapse in 12-18 months as everyone realises Labour hasn’t got a clue what to do except tax more, and allow in more migrants and asylum seekers
I'd like to agree, but I'm not so optimistic. I think they'll have created a country where enough people are public sector workers, benefit junkies or other layabouts so that they can get 20% of the electorate to support them as they just did forever. And will the enterprising and productive will leave. It won't be sudden - just gentle decline. And Nut Zero will be the final straw.
Welcome to Starmer's Britain - in fairness, the Conservatives by lazily failing to make the case for free enterprise since the 90s, have done much of his work for him.
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Sadly there is the same strand on the Right in the UK. It is less about political alignment and more about worship of the 'strong' leader who they think will somehow correct all the perceived wrongs of the centrists.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
Their poll rating will collapse in 12-18 months as everyone realises Labour hasn’t got a clue what to do except tax more, and allow in more migrants and asylum seekers
If the migrants are working in the health, care and hospitality sectors, only the racists will still be complaining. If the asylum seekers are processed efficiently, they will no longer be a major issue.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
If the Tories can ally with Reform, that 34% is VERY beatable
And as Labour are only going to impoverish and immiserate the country, the chances of a remarkable Labour defeat in 2028 are high
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier to secure, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
A few weeks ago,after the election had come and gone, the Today programme were interviewing two British guys who worked for refugee charities dealing with the people who use the small boats. Both of them unequivocally said that the Rwanda scheme had been acting as a deterrent already and many refugees were being put off by it. One of them said that Starmer had been given a nickname by the Kurdish refugees to praise him for dropping Rwanda.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
With Johnson and Truss running along to support him.
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I think something that isn't being commented up on about Labour finding the public finances being in a shite situation.
It looks like Labour are going for austerity over investment as a result.
I have been pointing out for years out that austerity wasn't a political choice in 2010 it was an economic necessity.
After all Labour were promising cuts deeper than Thatcher if they had won in 2010.
But they'e such nice people...
Sadly that is part of the problem.
They are nice decent people, with good upbringings and supportive families.
As a result they have never had to fight for the basics and don't appreciate fully how ruthless and deceptive millions of people who have will be if there is a chink of light in the systems armouring to exploit for gain, whether legally or illegally.
That is why you need the Lee Andersons as well as the Tugendhats,
Sunset Times front page reporting that Labour might scrap HS2 between Euston and Old Oak to help pay for hotels for illegal immigrants and inflation busting public sector rises £20 billion gap in finances the Tories left
Hopefully that's just a start to scrapping the whole misbegotten project. Building an absurdly expensive railway from somewhere near central Birmingham without any real links to a desolate part of west London is the biggest waste of money since the London Olympics. It may have made sense at £30 billion, it's crazy at £70 billion or £100 billion or whatever the current guess is - by far the most expensive rail line in the world per mile I think. Unless of course the idea is to show the rest of the world that we can do disastrously overrunning white elephants with no coherent business case.
We should leave that honour to the Californians and spend our money on something more useful, like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo Line extension, or even, shock, giving taxpayers a break.
The birmingham branch is just a nice to have bolt on.
The core route is Euston to Lichfield.
The main (unspoken) reason it is being built is to provide an extra pair pf tracks between Euston and Lichfield to allow more commuter trains to run between Euston and Rugby due to three huge new towns being built on the route (Hemel, MK and Northampton), also to fit some more goods trains on it.
(Compare the number of trains per hour in Rush Hour stopping at Northampton and Bedford and you get the picture and start to understand why commuter train overcrowding is epic on that line (to the extent that large numbers of people drive from places like Northampton and Daventry down the M1 to Flitwick and Harlington instead)
However, for it to work it needs to go to Euston. Terminating it at Wormwood Scrubs Parkway turns the whole thing into a white elephant, unless your nearest and dearest are incarcerated there, in which case it is quite handy.
You know they already double-tracked this route about 10 or 15 years ago, causing huge disruption?
The ECML upgrade system had three main objectives: *) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH; *) A new signalling system. *) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
The WCML “upgrade” is the best advert for doing HS2 as a brand new line. It was horrendously disruptive at the time, and delivered a fraction of what it was supposed to for many times the cost.
Ahem. My mistake - I wrote ECML instead of WCML. Hopefully people realised what I meant...
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Not surprising, given that Starmer headed one quango and Reeves worked at another.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
Their poll rating will collapse in 12-18 months as everyone realises Labour hasn’t got a clue what to do except tax more, and allow in more migrants and asylum seekers
If the migrants are working in the health, care and hospitality sectors, only the racists will still be complaining. If the asylum seekers are processed efficiently, they will no longer be a major issue.
As has been shown in Holland and Denmark, non western migrants are a net drain on an economy
As for the asylum seekers, you think “efficient processing” will deter others from coming? lol. No
“Labour admits Britain is locked in a small-boat crisis in the Channel just days after scrapping Tories' Rwanda deportation scheme - as 1,100 migrants land in UK since Keir Starmer took power.”
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
My instant reaction too, but that is partly because of the tradition in Glasgow etc. of lifting some of this temptingly provided copper cable as an easy way to get some copper cable to sell to the dodgy scrappie. Though I expect the shift to fibre and measures taken at the scrapyard end have reduced this problem in the UK.
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
A few weeks ago,after the election had come and gone, the Today programme were interviewing two British guys who worked for refugee charities dealing with the people who use the small boats. Both of them unequivocally said that the Rwanda scheme had been acting as a deterrent already and many refugees were being put off by it. One of them said that Starmer had been given a nickname by the Kurdish refugees to praise him for dropping Rwanda.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
I know. It is absolutely tragic. Rwanda might well have worked, even with Tory incompetents running it
I predict the boat numbers will now surge and the costs of housing and processing likewise, and in the end Labour will be forced to return to some form of Rwanda
Having spent 3 years trying all the other failed policies all over again, at vast expense
I also blame the Tories for being so fucking spineless they didn’t ram this through years earlier
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
Yes, something like that seems to have been the case. In which case it should have had nothing other than localised impact on a modern high speed railway. Those fibre cables should have had full diversity so that if you destroy them, all that happens is that the comms equipment reroutes the circuits they carry through another route. Easy enough to do. For example you just have one route up the LGV and diverse route via the Classic line. Gets expensive with branches where you have to dig up streets between their termini to link them together, but not the case here. The SNCF Network there is enough of a grid that the comms transmission backbone carrying everything should have multiple diverse routes.
I suspect there are going to be some high up S&T engineers in SNCF attending meetings sans coffee and biscuits come Monday.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
As Trump is constitutionally barred from a third term as far as he is concerned there isn't, he just needs to get his delayed second term and then he can finish the job of sorting America out
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
Next time the protest vote will be against an incumbent Labour government not the Tories
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
A few weeks ago,after the election had come and gone, the Today programme were interviewing two British guys who worked for refugee charities dealing with the people who use the small boats. Both of them unequivocally said that the Rwanda scheme had been acting as a deterrent already and many refugees were being put off by it. One of them said that Starmer had been given a nickname by the Kurdish refugees to praise him for dropping Rwanda.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
I know. It is absolutely tragic. Rwanda might well have worked, even with Tory incompetents running it
I predict the boat numbers will now surge and the costs of housing and processing likewise, and in the end Labour will be forced to return to some form of Rwanda
Having spent 3 years trying all the other failed policies all over again, at vast expense
I also blame the Tories for being so fucking spineless they didn’t ram this through years earlier
Labour wants to join EU schemes, which will involve taking EU migrants. A working Rwanda wouldn't have fitted with that.
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
A few weeks ago,after the election had come and gone, the Today programme were interviewing two British guys who worked for refugee charities dealing with the people who use the small boats. Both of them unequivocally said that the Rwanda scheme had been acting as a deterrent already and many refugees were being put off by it. One of them said that Starmer had been given a nickname by the Kurdish refugees to praise him for dropping Rwanda.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
I know. It is absolutely tragic. Rwanda might well have worked, even with Tory incompetents running it
I predict the boat numbers will now surge and the costs of housing and processing likewise, and in the end Labour will be forced to return to some form of Rwanda
Having spent 3 years trying all the other failed policies all over again, at vast expense
I also blame the Tories for being so fucking spineless they didn’t ram this through years earlier
Genuinely pleased that you are clinging to Rwanda. Even now.
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
A few weeks ago,after the election had come and gone, the Today programme were interviewing two British guys who worked for refugee charities dealing with the people who use the small boats. Both of them unequivocally said that the Rwanda scheme had been acting as a deterrent already and many refugees were being put off by it. One of them said that Starmer had been given a nickname by the Kurdish refugees to praise him for dropping Rwanda.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
I know. It is absolutely tragic. Rwanda might well have worked, even with Tory incompetents running it
I predict the boat numbers will now surge and the costs of housing and processing likewise, and in the end Labour will be forced to return to some form of Rwanda
Having spent 3 years trying all the other failed policies all over again, at vast expense
I also blame the Tories for being so fucking spineless they didn’t ram this through years earlier
Yes what does it profiteth the Labour Party even if they get a million new houses in five years built if a 200,001 refugee/immigrant households a year appear and need housing?
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
The sad ‘legacy’ of most Olympics is a whole load of expensive white elephant venues that never get used afterwards. Rio and Athens were particularly bad in this regard. At least a general purpose arena has more uses afterwards, as opposed to a massive pool in a city that has several already. IIRC a lot of the venues are partially temporary, and get downsized after the Games are over.
I believe Montreal was the worst. Left the city bankrupt for many years
I visited the city decades later and the locals were STILL angry about it
Did they not factor in that there would obviously be a reduced number of private school pupils?
If you read the article, the headline is the worst case of three scenarios. Granted, even the best case falls short of Labour expectations but by nowhere near as much - the VAT measure would raise £1.15 billion rather than £1.6 billion.
No one seems to be suggesting Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Dulwich will go to the wall over this but there are a lot of smaller schools, who, as we know, would struggle to survive.
On the plus side, the reduction in private opportunities for teachers should go some way towards relieving the state school teacher retention crisis, which means the state won't have to pay them so much. I wonder if that is included in the modelling.
Many private school teachers would give up teaching rather than teach in the average comp, plenty have Phds and could be academic researchers in universities or the private sector instead for example
Sunset Times front page reporting that Labour might scrap HS2 between Euston and Old Oak to help pay for hotels for illegal immigrants and inflation busting public sector rises £20 billion gap in finances the Tories left
Hopefully that's just a start to scrapping the whole misbegotten project. Building an absurdly expensive railway from somewhere near central Birmingham without any real links to a desolate part of west London is the biggest waste of money since the London Olympics. It may have made sense at £30 billion, it's crazy at £70 billion or £100 billion or whatever the current guess is - by far the most expensive rail line in the world per mile I think. Unless of course the idea is to show the rest of the world that we can do disastrously overrunning white elephants with no coherent business case.
We should leave that honour to the Californians and spend our money on something more useful, like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo Line extension, or even, shock, giving taxpayers a break.
The birmingham branch is just a nice to have bolt on.
The core route is Euston to Lichfield.
The main (unspoken) reason it is being built is to provide an extra pair pf tracks between Euston and Lichfield to allow more commuter trains to run between Euston and Rugby due to three huge new towns being built on the route (Hemel, MK and Northampton), also to fit some more goods trains on it.
(Compare the number of trains per hour in Rush Hour stopping at Northampton and Bedford and you get the picture and start to understand why commuter train overcrowding is epic on that line (to the extent that large numbers of people drive from places like Northampton and Daventry down the M1 to Flitwick and Harlington instead)
However, for it to work it needs to go to Euston. Terminating it at Wormwood Scrubs Parkway turns the whole thing into a white elephant, unless your nearest and dearest are incarcerated there, in which case it is quite handy.
You know they already double-tracked this route about 10 or 15 years ago, causing huge disruption?
The ECML upgrade system had three main objectives: *) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH; *) A new signalling system. *) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
The WCML “upgrade” is the best advert for doing HS2 as a brand new line. It was horrendously disruptive at the time, and delivered a fraction of what it was supposed to for many times the cost.
Ahem. My mistake - I wrote ECML instead of WCML. Hopefully people realised what I meant...
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
Yes, something like that seems to have been the case. In which case it should have had nothing other than localised impact on a modern high speed railway. Those fibre cables should have had full diversity so that if you destroy them, all that happens is that the comms equipment reroutes the circuits they carry through another route. Easy enough to do. For example you just have one route up the LGV and diverse route via the Classic line. Gets expensive with branches where you have to dig up streets between their termini to link them together, but not the case here. The SNCF Network there is enough of a grid that the comms transmission backbone carrying everything should have multiple diverse routes.
I suspect there are going to be some high up S&T engineers in SNCF attending meetings sans coffee and biscuits come Monday.
Sunset Times front page reporting that Labour might scrap HS2 between Euston and Old Oak to help pay for hotels for illegal immigrants and inflation busting public sector rises £20 billion gap in finances the Tories left
Hopefully that's just a start to scrapping the whole misbegotten project. Building an absurdly expensive railway from somewhere near central Birmingham without any real links to a desolate part of west London is the biggest waste of money since the London Olympics. It may have made sense at £30 billion, it's crazy at £70 billion or £100 billion or whatever the current guess is - by far the most expensive rail line in the world per mile I think. Unless of course the idea is to show the rest of the world that we can do disastrously overrunning white elephants with no coherent business case.
We should leave that honour to the Californians and spend our money on something more useful, like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo Line extension, or even, shock, giving taxpayers a break.
The birmingham branch is just a nice to have bolt on.
The core route is Euston to Lichfield.
The main (unspoken) reason it is being built is to provide an extra pair pf tracks between Euston and Lichfield to allow more commuter trains to run between Euston and Rugby due to three huge new towns being built on the route (Hemel, MK and Northampton), also to fit some more goods trains on it.
(Compare the number of trains per hour in Rush Hour stopping at Northampton and Bedford and you get the picture and start to understand why commuter train overcrowding is epic on that line (to the extent that large numbers of people drive from places like Northampton and Daventry down the M1 to Flitwick and Harlington instead)
However, for it to work it needs to go to Euston. Terminating it at Wormwood Scrubs Parkway turns the whole thing into a white elephant, unless your nearest and dearest are incarcerated there, in which case it is quite handy.
You know they already double-tracked this route about 10 or 15 years ago, causing huge disruption?
The ECML upgrade system had three main objectives: *) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH; *) A new signalling system. *) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
The WCML “upgrade” is the best advert for doing HS2 as a brand new line. It was horrendously disruptive at the time, and delivered a fraction of what it was supposed to for many times the cost.
Ahem. My mistake - I wrote ECML instead of WCML. Hopefully people realised what I meant...
Ha, so you did. It was somewhat obvious from the description which was being discussed.
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for second place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Did they not factor in that there would obviously be a reduced number of private school pupils?
If you read the article, the headline is the worst case of three scenarios. Granted, even the best case falls short of Labour expectations but by nowhere near as much - the VAT measure would raise £1.15 billion rather than £1.6 billion.
No one seems to be suggesting Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Dulwich will go to the wall over this but there are a lot of smaller schools, who, as we know, would struggle to survive.
On the plus side, the reduction in private opportunities for teachers should go some way towards relieving the state school teacher retention crisis, which means the state won't have to pay them so much. I wonder if that is included in the modelling.
Many private school teachers would give up teaching rather than teach in the average comp, plenty have Phds and could be academic researchers in universities or the private sector instead for example
Speaking to Nurses/Docs in a private hospital /GP gets you the same with knobs on.
The impression I get is that the NHS is so riddled with petty procedure and poor petty management that it is the most miserable place to work with less scope to use your own judgement than a man turning a wheel all day in a Victorian Mill.
Why on earth have Paris made the main Olympic swimming pool temporary? Their permanent aquatics centre is only being used for the artistic swimming, water polo and diving events.
Because they can sell more tickets in the temporary venue, it’s the largest indoor arena in Europe and recently hosted The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift. They get 15,000 people in the swimming pool configuration.
This video explains why. It comes down to cost and risk. You reduce the cost and even more so the risk if you reuse existing facilities. Paris will cost about half the London games, which was a somewhat better managed Olympics than most of the recent ones.
The amount of legacy they will get from it is not massively different from other cities. Olympics have always been justified for host cities on the legacy it generates but it has nearly always been a nonsense. The $10 billion or whatever buys you a three week party the world is invited to.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
As Trump is constitutionally barred from a third term as far as he is concerned there isn't, he just needs to get his delayed second term and then he can finish the job of sorting America out
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
Yes, something like that seems to have been the case. In which case it should have had nothing other than localised impact on a modern high speed railway. Those fibre cables should have had full diversity so that if you destroy them, all that happens is that the comms equipment reroutes the circuits they carry through another route. Easy enough to do. For example you just have one route up the LGV and diverse route via the Classic line. Gets expensive with branches where you have to dig up streets between their termini to link them together, but not the case here. The SNCF Network there is enough of a grid that the comms transmission backbone carrying everything should have multiple diverse routes.
I suspect there are going to be some high up S&T engineers in SNCF attending meetings sans coffee and biscuits come Monday.
By 'diversity' I assume you mean 'redundancy' ? That can lead to all sorts of other issues, especially where fail-safe is the priority (as it is on the railways).
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
If the Tories can ally with Reform, that 34% is VERY beatable
And as Labour are only going to impoverish and immiserate the country, the chances of a remarkable Labour defeat in 2028 are high
As previously noted "a wish is not a claim upon reality". The Tories are done for quite a while, maybe forever. The "unacceptable versus the insipid" leadership race shows no sign of turning the Tories around. As for Farage, disappearing up Trumps fundament while trying to crap on Ukraine is why he will never achieve office. The Doughty St tendency has led the right down a path of infantile populism coloured with aggression that makes Patel a stateswoman and Jenrick a moderate. Face up to it- you're finished as a coherent political force under any of these leaders. All you have left is coarse, populist invective a la Trump, and that is a position of failure. Trying to fight old battles just reminds us how much we loathe these people. You need to press a reset button that isn't Farage or Patel or Jenrick. Won't happen this time though.
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for third place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Where are the new Tory voters going to come from to replace the ones who are dying off?
Did they not factor in that there would obviously be a reduced number of private school pupils?
If you read the article, the headline is the worst case of three scenarios. Granted, even the best case falls short of Labour expectations but by nowhere near as much - the VAT measure would raise £1.15 billion rather than £1.6 billion.
No one seems to be suggesting Eton, Winchester, Harrow or Dulwich will go to the wall over this but there are a lot of smaller schools, who, as we know, would struggle to survive.
On the plus side, the reduction in private opportunities for teachers should go some way towards relieving the state school teacher retention crisis, which means the state won't have to pay them so much. I wonder if that is included in the modelling.
Many private school teachers would give up teaching rather than teach in the average comp, plenty have Phds and could be academic researchers in universities or the private sector instead for example
Speaking to Nurses/Docs in a private hospital /GP gets you the same with knobs on.
The impression I get is that the NHS is so riddled with petty procedure and poor petty management that it is the most miserable place to work with less scope to use your own judgement than a man turning a wheel all day in a Victorian Mill.
Cobblers. From my experience, admittedly 25 years or so ago.
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for third place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Where are the new Tory voters going to come from to replace the ones who are dying off?
This is the nightmare the Tories have to face into. They *know* they are right. They *know* that Rwanda would have worked. But the voters largely disagree and disagree in very large numbers.
They need policies that appeal to people younger than 70. And until they realise that their existing ideas are shit, they will fail. Aspiration. Sound finances. Business. How on earth have they managed to bin off all those values?
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for third place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Where are the new Tory voters going to come from to replace the ones who are dying off?
Remember in 1974 the Tories only won voters over 55 with Heath, yet in 1979 the Tories even won 18-21 year olds with Thatcher as well as every age group above.
In 1997 the Tories lost every age group, even over 65 pensioners Sunak still won, in 2001 and 2005 Hague and Howard lost most voters under 55, in 2010 though Cameron won most voters over 25.
A failing Labour government running a poor economy with rising inflation and taxes and slow growth does wonders for winning back younger voters to the Tories!
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
Next time the protest vote will be against an incumbent Labour government not the Tories
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
Next time the protest vote will be against an incumbent Labour government not the Tories
Or against both, if the LDs play their cards right.....
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for third place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Where are the new Tory voters going to come from to replace the ones who are dying off?
This is the nightmare the Tories have to face into. They *know* they are right. They *know* that Rwanda would have worked. But the voters largely disagree and disagree in very large numbers.
They need policies that appeal to people younger than 70. And until they realise that their existing ideas are shit, they will fail. Aspiration. Sound finances. Business. How on earth have they managed to bin off all those values?
They can rely on Labour to fail, badly. And so far I’d say that’s the likeliest outcome
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
As Trump is constitutionally barred from a third term as far as he is concerned there isn't, he just needs to get his delayed second term and then he can finish the job of sorting America out
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
I remember in May 1997 it really did feel like the dawn of a new era and real change afoot.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
Quite, but Labour are actively and energetically supporting that asphyxiation of democracy. They want more power to be handed to the OBR for example.
Risible. Attempting a coup, as Trump did, that’s asphyxiating democracy. Saying you’ll put things through the OBR isn’t.
Having a putsch is one way to end democracy - gradually legislating it out of existence is another.
This nonsense really is the last refuge of the defeated Tory Right. If you had any genuine concern about democracy, you'd be looking at America, where the candidate of the Right is openly telling people that if he wins there won't be any need to vote next time!
As Trump is constitutionally barred from a third term as far as he is concerned there isn't, he just needs to get his delayed second term and then he can finish the job of sorting America out
Your best attempt at making sense of that Trump nonsense is "Après moi, le déluge"?
The Tellygraf is reporting that the French train sabotage might have been done by far left radicals and not Putin. Seems unlikely. Tho given the pro-Putin sentiments of some on the French left, maybe they worked TOGETHER
Russia stopped being far left in 1991. If it was Le Pen'ite far right types then maybe.
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
But there’s a strand of pro Putin love on the far left, in France. That is le point
Possibly, although I doubt that left wing rail workers are much into that rabbit hole.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
It really does not require much knowledge. In fact, I'd argue the most knowledge required is where you can access the railway, and how to make an incendiary device that would create a hot enough fire in an easily-transportable manner. Cables, and particularly fibre optics, can be time-consuming to cut and splice. As for where; somewhere on a fast part of the network, preferably with points and/or signals. But even cabling damage on a a stretch of plain line would be a PITA for the network.
.
You do realise that railway systems, particularly newer ones like the LGVs have what is known as diversity and redundancy.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure).
Yes... I'm well aware, thanks.
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Depends how well they are designed and what diversity and redundancy is built in. The better designs even allow main control centre to be destroyed and the network run from a backup.
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
The few videos I've seen of the disruption shows people fixing and splicing cables in troughing, not even working at S&T cabinets.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
Yes, something like that seems to have been the case. In which case it should have had nothing other than localised impact on a modern high speed railway. Those fibre cables should have had full diversity so that if you destroy them, all that happens is that the comms equipment reroutes the circuits they carry through another route. Easy enough to do. For example you just have one route up the LGV and diverse route via the Classic line. Gets expensive with branches where you have to dig up streets between their termini to link them together, but not the case here. The SNCF Network there is enough of a grid that the comms transmission backbone carrying everything should have multiple diverse routes.
I suspect there are going to be some high up S&T engineers in SNCF attending meetings sans coffee and biscuits come Monday.
By 'diversity' I assume you mean 'redundancy' ? That can lead to all sorts of other issues, especially where fail-safe is the priority (as it is on the railways).
No not the same thing.
You have a triangle of railways between A, B and C. You run a fibre backbone around the whole network.
If you cut the fibre a mile and a half from A on the line between A and B then the comms transmission bearer reroutes evertyhing to run via C, including the equipment box two miles from A which instead of routing via a mile of the A to B fibre routes from A to C to B then most of the way back to the equipment box near A.
You have to ensure that every bit of the fibre route from A to B is physically diverse from the Fibre Routes from A to C or from C to B.
As I once said on an equalities module in a management course to general laughter and a stunned lecturer who had asked what "Diversity" mean't.
"Diversity means Effective Segregation."
Redundancy would be having two equipment boxes two miles down the track from A.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
If the Tories can ally with Reform, that 34% is VERY beatable
And as Labour are only going to impoverish and immiserate the country, the chances of a remarkable Labour defeat in 2028 are high
As previously noted "a wish is not a claim upon reality". The Tories are done for quite a while, maybe forever. The "unacceptable versus the insipid" leadership race shows no sign of turning the Tories around. As for Farage, disappearing up Trumps fundament while trying to crap on Ukraine is why he will never achieve office. The Doughty St tendency has led the right down a path of infantile populism coloured with aggression that makes Patel a stateswoman and Jenrick a moderate. Face up to it- you're finished as a coherent political force under any of these leaders. All you have left is coarse, populist invective a la Trump, and that is a position of failure. Trying to fight old battles just reminds us how much we loathe these people. You need to press a reset button that isn't Farage or Patel or Jenrick. Won't happen this time though.
Jenrick is absolutely the leader the Tories need. Morality. Brains. Emotional IQ.
Well, the barrel is truly being scraped. None of the above is not an option, and it seems to me that whoever wins, they could end up losing more seats next time.
Tories for third party in the 2030s? It is beginning to look like it really could happen.
The whole party has been on transmit for a very long time, and the voters seem to have changed frequency.
If the LDs or Reform didn't overtake the Tories for third place this time they never will.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
Where are the new Tory voters going to come from to replace the ones who are dying off?
This is the nightmare the Tories have to face into. They *know* they are right. They *know* that Rwanda would have worked. But the voters largely disagree and disagree in very large numbers.
They need policies that appeal to people younger than 70. And until they realise that their existing ideas are shit, they will fail. Aspiration. Sound finances. Business. How on earth have they managed to bin off all those values?
They can rely on Labour to fail, badly. And so far I’d say that’s the likeliest outcome
Won't be enough. If its a protest vote against a failing government not delivering the policies they want, it won't be a switch to a mad Tory party being led by a loon advocating God knows what.
The biggest problem Labour have coming down the tracks as far as I can see is all the consequences of the ming vase strategy coming home to roost at the budget.
They deliberately did not try to sell any policies to the electorate at the election and are now going to try and justify policies after the event. I said at the time they needed to be bolder and they weren’t. This is a risky moment for them.
Nah they got a Liam Byrne note * 1000 hall pass for the next few years.
Besides, the political opposition is currently at its weakest.
Elections can do two things. One is to give a mandate for the future, the other is to pass judgement on the past. The second is way more important. If (and it's a non-trivial if) Labour can point to real improvements by May 2028, anything bad they do now won't matter.
But all the signs indicate they have zero ideas and zero energy. And they will thus achieve nothing, indeed, in areas like asylum and immigration they might be far worse (incredibly)
So what happens now - the first 100 days - really IS important. Not pivotal - but important
Remember starmer got that majority with just 34% of the vote. Less than Corbyn. He could easily lose the next GE on that basis, despite all those MPs
Though Labour only got 34% of the vote, there are 150 Labour MPs with solid majorities of over 10K (and 26 LibDem MPs with majorities of over 10K )
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
If the Tories can ally with Reform, that 34% is VERY beatable
And as Labour are only going to impoverish and immiserate the country, the chances of a remarkable Labour defeat in 2028 are high
As previously noted "a wish is not a claim upon reality". The Tories are done for quite a while, maybe forever.
Bit of a lack of self-awareness gem, this sentence combo.
Comments
Irwin Stelzer was born in May 1932, which at the time of his 'prediction' makes him 16.
Jenrick doesn't need to prove he can apologise; weasel words to the press and public are a more basic skill than wiping his own bottom; he needs to prove that he has unfruitlooped his brain and obtained some decent personal values from somewhere.
The more important question: is the man human, yet?
*) Increase the line speed from 110 MPH to 140 MPH;
*) A new signalling system.
*) Increase capacity.
The line speed was only increased to 125 MPH; partly because the new signalling system was scrapped. There was an increase of capacity; but not as much as planned because of the signalling system being scrapped.
And instead of costing (from memory...) about a billion, it cost about ten to eleven billion. And as it was years late, the disruption to passengers was massive.
Upgrading existing railway lines is mahoosively difficult, time-consuming and expensive - see also the GW electrification program.
This time, it feels much like the deckchairs on the Titanic being reshuffled. Same old Office of Budget Responsibility, same old Supreme Court enforcing ECHR nosturms, same old Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee setting interest rates etc etc.
The Ministers and MPs are reduced to councillors trying to oversee a permanent self governing standing bureaucracy that they have little control of and which has a vested interest in more regulation and therefore more renumerative work for them and their associates.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/27/lib-dems-admit-discriminating-against-gender-critical-candi/
“The Liberal Democrats have admitted discriminating against a mother who was barred from standing as an MP after wearing a T-shirt reading: “Woman: Adult, Human, Female.”
“Natalie Bird, 43, says she was suspended from the party after being “harrassed” and “smeared” by activists because she fought for women’s rights and expressed her opinion that it is not possible for a person to change sex.
“After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, the party admitted Ms Bird’s claims at the 11th hour before the trial was due to begin next month.
“Ms Bird said that her treatment and that of other gender-critical women shows that the Lib Dems have a “women problem” and have questions to answer about why they took so long to admit discriminating against her.
“A costs hearing at which she is expected to be awarded thousands in damages is due to be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice next month.”
I observed yesterday that there was a lot of confirmation bias in yesterdays speculation here as to who did it.
buffet. And forbid the use of the word “iceberg”
Things are looking pretty good in America, not far off "who is this Trump guy anyway?" The Dem supporters there and here pushing the don't be beastly to Joe line must feel a bit silly.
"Triathlon swim training scrapped because of pollution"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/articles/cn05nxv2z9po
AIUI they spent a billion building a big interceptor reservoir upstream, but it is not large enough to cope with heavy rainfall - as they've just had. All in all, it seems like the project was a little shit, causing a lot of shit in the river.
Compare and contrast to the £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel, which I'd argue was doing the job properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel
Just as they did during the Cold War. See also their support for Venezuela.
And this needed some seriously knowledgable insiders to know where to set fire to the cable trough to cause line shutting chaos rather than delays.
"Puberty-blocker drug firm donated cash to Lib Dems"
https://www.thetimes.com/article/d9e1c404-191c-11ea-a9c5-93ba951187e8?shareToken=36392c8f67836df2b450d80506195e0b
I've been wrong about lots of other things since but that prediction, gained from my studies of the American and NATO militaries in magazines like War Machine and computer games like F-19, turned out OK.
It taught me that when somebody gets really emotional about something they don't understand it's a great time to bet against them.
Oh and my friend never paid. I still bring it up occasionally when he's too sure about his opinions, and he's one of those people who usually is.
All the signs are though that they will double down on such sacred texts.
Government spending was £1,189 billion in 2023-24. Complaining about about £20 billion (1.6%) of that on that is "look over there" distraction, which won't work unless they materially improve things.
IE
we are not following the ECHR rules 'for a bit' while we sort out small boats
We're going to 'have a break' from taking in new asylum seekers while we sort out the current situation.
.....
etc
Several decades ago, myself and two friends - both rail workers - sat down in a pub and spitballed the best way to cause a mass casualty event on the railway. It's frighteningly easy - what we came up with eventually was something like the Stonehaven incident. A big issue was timing it for the 'right' trains - ones going fast, and preferably at a point where two or three trains cross in close succession.
It isn't that the political class hasn't been able to think about them, its that their previous legislation and the standing bodies it brought into life prevents them from doing it and they view the idea of repealing such legislation with much the same distate as receiving a pair of used socks from Leon in the post.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_La_Défense_Arena
Cool timelapse video of the build-up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzcUzgiX5ac
"Chancellor’s speech will claim Tory policy’s ‘hidden’ £10bn cost is three times previous estimates"
https://x.com/tonydowson5/status/1817165088345735624?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
And they have no idea how to fix this. They don’t even have “Rwanda”. And the boat people are crossing in ever greater numbers. And so the Titanic ploughs on towards the iceberg
If you're going to do a job, do it right.
They're also actively and energetically supporting the asphyxiation of our economy. Their first big action will be to shovel more money at their public sector union friends, and their second will be to soak the already overtaxed enterprising and productive for it.
As has been completely predictable throughout, no matter how much they tried to hide it or lied.
This means that you might only achieve a lot of flashing lights in a control centre and rerouting of circuits via diverse cables that have not gone up in smoke, or degraded mode operation where backup systems enable trains to pass at reduced speed and less frequently, possibly with local manual intervention.
To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact.
SNCF will now be urgently working on eliminating or mitigating those (and feeling annoyed with themselves that they got caught out to the extent they did on such modern infrastructure) and ensuring the other single points of failure are in very secure compounds.
I visited the city decades later and the locals were STILL angry about it
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/06/40-year-hangover-1976-olympic-games-broke-montreal-canada
“Forty years on, no other Olympics has so thoroughly broken a city.”
AIUI the degraded mode systems do not allow anywhere near the same speeds, and hence capacity. More so if linesmen have to be on the track fixing the blooming thing.
"To cause the sort of chaos (multiple entire routes hundreds of miles long closed for days) that we have seen; you need to know, in detail, the few single points of failure that will maximise impact."
I disagree. It is far easier than you claim, especially with systems that rely on in-cab signalling, such as the TGV.
Stellar was, btw, 16 in 1948.
The Tories have only 5 MPs with over 10K majorities. The 121 Tory MPs are spread very thinly. Toast?
Welcome to Starmer's Britain - in fairness, the Conservatives by lazily failing to make the case for free enterprise since the 90s, have done much of his work for him.
Both extremes are equally lost in this delusion.
And as Labour are only going to impoverish and immiserate the country, the chances of a remarkable Labour defeat in 2028 are high
Eliminating lineside signals and all their local cabling makes things much easier to secure, especially if radio rather than inductive wires down the middle of the track is used.
Value engineering imposed by the bean counters often destroys most of the benefits to save 10% of the costs though.
These two guys were the sort of person you might think would be instinctively anti Rwanda being fluffy refugee charity sorts but whether they agreed or not they were clear it worked as a deterrent.
A week or two later they had an interview with a girl, think she was Iraqi, who was absolutely clear her family didn’t want to cross whilst Rwanda was in play but would now.
Funnily enough the BBC didn’t find these people to interview when everyone was piling in on the Rwanda scheme.
So in a different dimension Labour and co didn’t put up every barrier to Rwanda in parliament and the Lords and the scheme was up and running ages ago successfully deterring thousands of illegal migrants, there was a much smaller need for hotel bills to be paid and this “black hole” situation isn’t as bad.
See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clmyjz5xkylo as an example.
I wonder if the 'attack' was as simple as pouting petrol into the troughing, then lighting it.
They are nice decent people, with good upbringings and supportive families.
As a result they have never had to fight for the basics and don't appreciate fully how ruthless and deceptive millions of people who have will be if there is a chink of light in the systems armouring to exploit for gain, whether legally or illegally.
That is why you need the Lee Andersons as well as the Tugendhats,
https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/
As for the asylum seekers, you think “efficient processing” will deter others from coming? lol. No
“Labour admits Britain is locked in a small-boat crisis in the Channel just days after scrapping Tories' Rwanda deportation scheme - as 1,100 migrants land in UK since Keir Starmer took power.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13641121/Labour-admits-Britain-locked-small-boat-crisis-Channel-just-days-scrapping-Tories-Rwanda-deportation-scheme-1-100-migrants-land-UK-Keir-Starmer-took-power.html
I predict the boat numbers will now surge and the costs of housing and processing likewise, and in the end Labour will be forced to return to some form of Rwanda
Having spent 3 years trying all the other failed policies all over again, at vast expense
I also blame the Tories for being so fucking spineless they didn’t ram this through years earlier
I suspect there are going to be some high up S&T engineers in SNCF attending meetings sans coffee and biscuits come Monday.
Tessa Sanderson in today's Times:
At my first Olympics, in Montreal in 1976, we were six to a room, which was tough.
Plus remember even Ed Miliband's Labour led half the polls from 2010 to 2015 after getting just 29% in 2010 and of course even Hague's Tories led in 2000 when the fuel crisis was on.
If the economy is poor in 4 or 5 years time and immigration rising without proper controls there will be a swing back from Labour to Tories
The impression I get is that the NHS is so riddled with petty procedure and poor petty management that it is the most miserable place to work with less scope to use your own judgement than a man turning a wheel all day in a Victorian Mill.
The amount of legacy they will get from it is not massively different from other cities. Olympics have always been justified for host cities on the legacy it generates but it has nearly always been a nonsense. The $10 billion or whatever buys you a three week party the world is invited to.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/25/why-the-paris-olympics-cost-so-much-little.html
The Doughty St tendency has led the right down a path of infantile populism coloured with aggression that makes Patel a stateswoman and Jenrick a moderate. Face up to it- you're finished as a coherent political force under any of these leaders. All you have left is coarse, populist invective a la Trump, and that is a position of failure.
Trying to fight old battles just reminds us how much we loathe these people. You need to press a reset button that isn't Farage or Patel or Jenrick. Won't happen this time though.
Indeed not one of the Tory leadership contenders, Jenrick, Cleverly, Braverman, Badenoch, Patel or Tugendhat went to Oxford let alone studied PPE.
So whoever wins the only main party leader left who studied PPE at Oxford once Sunak steps down will be Ed Davey
Now they are all heavily switching. Movies that simply want to entertain and not preach are popular. Who knew?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/business/media/hollywood-movies-red-state-audiences.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
They need policies that appeal to people younger than 70. And until they realise that their existing ideas are shit, they will fail. Aspiration. Sound finances. Business. How on earth have they managed to bin off all those values?
In 1997 the Tories lost every age group, even over 65 pensioners Sunak still won, in 2001 and 2005 Hague and Howard lost most voters under 55, in 2010 though Cameron won most voters over 25.
A failing Labour government running a poor economy with rising inflation and taxes and slow growth does wonders for winning back younger voters to the Tories!
You have a triangle of railways between A, B and C. You run a fibre backbone around the whole network.
If you cut the fibre a mile and a half from A on the line between A and B then the comms transmission bearer reroutes evertyhing to run via C, including the equipment box two miles from A which instead of routing via a mile of the A to B fibre routes from A to C to B then most of the way back to the equipment box near A.
You have to ensure that every bit of the fibre route from A to B is physically diverse from the Fibre Routes from A to C or from C to B.
As I once said on an equalities module in a management course to general laughter and a stunned lecturer who had asked what "Diversity" mean't.
"Diversity means Effective Segregation."
Redundancy would be having two equipment boxes two miles down the track from A.