The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
Time will show that you have got this wrong but no point arguing over it
Oh I may well have it wrong - but I seriously doubt it, go and watch the Wayve homepage video and imagine what would happen if the car hadn't slowed down as the pedestrian crossed the road.. Now work out whose insurance is paying for this...
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
How good is good enough with China? And Vladivostok is a very long way away if the mood suddenly sours. They need quite a few troops in their client statelets in North Ossetia and Transdnistria; and they've got imperial overseas forces in Africa and Syria and the like haven't they? (Granted some of these are Wagner but they're still Russian armed men). NATO isn't going to invade, but Russia either believes or wants to maintain the fiction that it believes that they will.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
I find that extremely hard to believe and would like to see some data on that, given how many people are exempt from paying NI altogether but are not exempt from paying income tax.
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
Meaning you can get it to work 99.999% of the time but that until you can get it to work 100% of the time it doesn't actually work?
I remember back in 2017 seeing a conference with various transport futurists, in which I think the median predicted date for autonomous vehicles outnumbering non-autonomous on the roads was 2024. Still five months to go...
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
That is a good spot. It would also cause all sorts of manipulation on how people took drawdown pensions. Logically if merged like @BartholomewRoberts suggests it should be done on an annual basis (as with directors NI) anyway to eliminate all of that and the Govt would have to suck up losing the bonus windfall.
@BartholomewRoberts suggestion does make sense in my opinion. Just get rid of it and increase the Income tax rate appropriately. Long overdue.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please tell us how big the NHS workforce should be.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
Hardly a 'massive shortage' in an organisation that is continually recruiting as its present workforce retires, relocates and dies.
Those vacancies would have been filled within a few weeks and months while different vacancies would have been created and filled since and yet more vacancies exist currently and will be filled in the near future.
The NHS workforce has increased by over 300k during the last the last five years:
I think >100k people is massive sorry. The report says 8% and that this is likely an underestimate.
This shortage has been longstanding, we have to go abroad to meet our needs.
We have fewer doctors, gps, nurses per capita than most oecd countries... I think Aus has 40% more nurses for instance.
I do think we could make better use of what we have. NHS management is poor and capital investments have been lacking.
But the idea that we can cut 20% of staff is absurd.
The NHS has been recruiting from abroad since it was created - Jamaican nurses and Indian doctors were a cultural stereotype as early as the 1950s.
And overall numbers have significantly increased in recent years:
NHS staff numbers have increased, with doctor numbers up 26% and nurses up 24% over the five years to March 2024. The NHS vacancy rate was 6.9% in March 2024, down from 8.0% in March 2023.
Job vacancies, as well as being used for replacing the 'natural wastage' of the current workforce, are a feature of an expanding workforce.
So the easiest way to reduce NHS job vacancies would be to stop increasing the NHS workforce.
The fallacy of the thinking behind 'country X has more nurses and country Y has more doctors so we should have even more nurses and doctors' is it doesn't take into account cost effectiveness in a world of limited resources.
We could double spending on the NHS but how much improvement to the health of the population would that bring ? Certainly not 100%, in fact I doubt it would even be 10%. Meanwhile the opportunity cost of not using those extra resources elsewhere would be far higher.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
I find that extremely hard to believe and would like to see some data on that, given how many people are exempt from paying NI altogether but are not exempt from paying income tax.
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
NI is paid periodically over the week / month.
Hence a student will earn say £500 a week over the summer and so pay £20 a week or so of NI (8% of £250). But they will earn in total £10,000 over the summer so won't be paying Income tax...
Any changes to the pension reliefs are going to be counterproductive. You need to encourage saving for retirement - most higher rate taxpayers aren’t wealthy by any means. For those that are higher earners, they’ll work out a more tax efficient way to invest.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
In the gymnastics yesterday, the commentators were describing routines that viewers could not see
Apparently the BBC did not buy all the rights
Discovery bought the rights pre-Tokyo. By law, they are required to show the games on free to air so subcontracted to the BBC. However, what constitutes meeting the law is contentious. When it was written, the red button and iPlayer didn't exist. So, the BBC has the rights to two streams of sport. That the BBC choose to fill up one of those streams with talking is their decision.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Satellite photos show that Russia has pulled most of the tanks out of the military bases in the east. I suspect the only actual defences in place are a token infantry presence and the threat of nuclear retaliation. Plus the only plausible eastern invader is China, who seem unlikely to want to invade?
I guess North Korea might go nuts & go for Vladivostok. That would be entertaining.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
What about the border with the USA? I realise that's water but they're pretty close.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Bloody Claire Balding is bloody awful. She doesn't appear to actually like sport - she's trying to make everything into a human interest story. I mean, I don't mind a bit of backstory, but the balance of sport/chat ought to be at least 80% in sport's favour. It's less than 50/50 at the moment. However, there is the iplayer coverage, which ameliorates this a bit.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
What about the border with the USA? I realise that's water but they're pretty close.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
Meaning you can get it to work 99.999% of the time but that until you can get it to work 100% of the time it doesn't actually work?
I remember back in 2017 seeing a conference with various transport futurists, in which I think the median predicted date for autonomous vehicles outnumbering non-autonomous on the roads was 2024. Still five months to go...
Meaning that the one time it doesn't work is possibly significant enough (you killed a pedestrian crossing the road) that it's 99.9999% reliability is required before it can be implemented.
You should note that I don't include most Tesla incidents of this type as they have a habit of killing the driver so there is a bit of self inflicted no sympathy there..
Compare that to AI where the market seems very happy to sell systems that introduce complete fabrications as facts hoping that an initial reader will vet what was written before submitting it.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
In the gymnastics yesterday, the commentators were describing routines that viewers could not see
Apparently the BBC did not buy all the rights
Discovery bought the rights pre-Tokyo. By law, they are required to show the games on free to air so subcontracted to the BBC. However, what constitutes meeting the law is contentious. When it was written, the red button and iPlayer didn't exist. So, the BBC has the rights to two streams of sport. That the BBC choose to fill up one of those streams with talking is their decision.
But it's worse than that. The BBC were showing live gymnastics, just not the GB team, so the commentators described the GB routines while viewers watched the Ukranians doing something completely different.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
You only have to look at my question about when the Union Jack flies at Dublin Castle to see the difficulty this will have.
Mainline railway signalling systems require SIL4 (99.999 to 99.9999%) and that is of the whole system not just individual components.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Bloody Claire Balding is bloody awful. She doesn't appear to actually like sport - she's trying to make everything into a human interest story. I mean, I don't mind a bit of backstory, but the balance of sport/chat ought to be at least 80% in sport's favour. It's less than 50/50 at the moment. However, there is the iplayer coverage, which ameliorates this a bit.
£3.99 for a Discovery Plus account and you can stream what you want with multiple, multiple cameras including every piece of Gym equipment.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
I find that extremely hard to believe and would like to see some data on that, given how many people are exempt from paying NI altogether but are not exempt from paying income tax.
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
NI is paid periodically over the week / month.
Hence a student will earn say £500 a week over the summer and so pay £20 a week or so of NI (8% of £250). But they will earn in total £10,000 over the summer so won't be paying Income tax...
NI being monthly and income tax annual was very advantageous for me at the back end of last year, as I kept within the basic rate but everything over 4 and a bit k (In the month)was only at 2% NI - the total NI and tax was actually lower on my bonus packet than my regular pay !
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
I find that extremely hard to believe and would like to see some data on that, given how many people are exempt from paying NI altogether but are not exempt from paying income tax.
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
NI is paid periodically over the week / month.
Hence a student will earn say £500 a week over the summer and so pay £20 a week or so of NI (8% of £250). But they will earn in total £10,000 over the summer so won't be paying Income tax...
Yes and students are both numerically and earning-wise absolute peanuts compared to pensioners and the self-employed etc who don't pay NI either at all or at the same rate as those on PAYE so why pretend this is relevant?
Plus you claimed bonuses, but bonuses are a way to game the system to reduce taxes not increase them, which is why Directors NI is annualised because otherwise they could easily give themselves their taxfree allowance each month then once a year a bonus for the rest of their income and face 2% tax on most of their earnings rather than the full rate.
Allowing students to annualise their tax-free allowance on NI would be a positive not a negative of my system in my view and much fairer than trying to take small amounts off students while ignoring the entire earnings of millions of people.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Maybe there's just more padding because how much they can show is so restricted? Discovery is the main rights holder in Europe and is broadcasting practically everything.
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
In the gymnastics yesterday, the commentators were describing routines that viewers could not see
Apparently the BBC did not buy all the rights
Discovery bought the rights pre-Tokyo. By law, they are required to show the games on free to air so subcontracted to the BBC. However, what constitutes meeting the law is contentious. When it was written, the red button and iPlayer didn't exist. So, the BBC has the rights to two streams of sport. That the BBC choose to fill up one of those streams with talking is their decision.
But it's worse than that. The BBC were showing live gymnastics, just not the GB team, so the commentators described the GB routines while viewers watched the Ukranians doing something completely different.
That sounds like a different scenario. I don't know how much freedom each country's broadcasters have for such events - Sky will sometimes show golf shots by British players that are different to the world feed (you often see the same shot a few minutes later - most golf isn't live), but don't know if that's possible with the gymnastics.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
If they were clever they would merge Tax and NI and up the tax allowance for people over 67 to £18,000 a year.
This would mean anyone of pension age with income up to £30k would be better off but early retirees and big public sector pension recipients get soaked.
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
There is a scenario in which the Russian situation in Ukraine worsens, and Chinese support for Russia is increasingly conditional. In that scenario, the absence of troops in Russia's far east starts to get more problematic.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
If they were clever they would merge Tax and NI and up the tax allowance for people over 67 to £18,000 a year.
This would mean anyone of pension age with income up to £30k would be better off but early retirees and big public sector pension recipients get soaked.
Would still be very unpopular though.
I take it your pension is estimated to give you an income of £29,000 on retirement?
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Except that would cost the Government money given how the allowances work.
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus
I find that extremely hard to believe and would like to see some data on that, given how many people are exempt from paying NI altogether but are not exempt from paying income tax.
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
NI is paid periodically over the week / month.
Hence a student will earn say £500 a week over the summer and so pay £20 a week or so of NI (8% of £250). But they will earn in total £10,000 over the summer so won't be paying Income tax...
Yes and students are both numerically and earning-wise absolute peanuts compared to pensioners and the self-employed etc who don't pay NI either at all or at the same rate as those on PAYE so why pretend this is relevant?
Plus you claimed bonuses, but bonuses are a way to game the system to reduce taxes not increase them, which is why Directors NI is annualised because otherwise they could easily give themselves their taxfree allowance each month then once a year a bonus for the rest of their income and face 2% tax on most of their earnings rather than the full rate.
Allowing students to annualise their tax-free allowance on NI would be a positive not a negative of my system in my view and much fairer than trying to take small amounts off students while ignoring the entire earnings of millions of people.
A lot of students do work through the terms, much more than used to be the case is my impression.
PLus it does count for eligibility to a state pension. Which you may not like, granted.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
Some of them were also to China what Ukraine is to Russia (ie part of China until imperial Russia invaded).
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
On the bits I've watched it's not been that bad - then again I don't really watch for the commentary...
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
If they were clever they would merge Tax and NI and up the tax allowance for people over 67 to £18,000 a year.
This would mean anyone of pension age with income up to £30k would be better off but early retirees and big public sector pension recipients get soaked.
Would still be very unpopular though.
I take it your pension is estimated to give you an income of £29,000 on retirement?
It would be much that before I reach state pension age but rather more after that.
So I would actually lose out quite badly if this happened.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
I've gone the Discovery through Amazon Prime route - which apparently was marginally the "wrong" way to do it but you get 2 Eurosport channels and a whole bunch of streams (I've particularly enjoyed the late night surfing). The commentary has been perfectly fine, the worst part is the way to select stuff is a bit odd
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
that makes sense now. If I'd known this I've forgotten.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
That sum paid by discovery was for the whole European rights package.
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
Would have to be a pretty wide tunnel.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
Rupert Harrison @rbrharrison I'm normally a big defender of the OBR as an institution but the timing of Richard Hughes' letter is an error that plays into Labour's fundamentally untrue narrative. He has allowed normal in-year spending pressures to be turned into a political scoring point. 1/
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Absolutely not, NI income should be ringfenced to fund contributory JSA and also some healthcare, social care costs and to go towards the state pension as NI was set up to fund.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
that makes sense now. If I'd known this I've forgotten.
You'd have thought that having paid a king's ransom for the rights, there'd be a marketing blitz to sell Discovery+ subscriptions to sports and Olympics-only fans, but what do I know?
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Bloody Claire Balding is bloody awful. She doesn't appear to actually like sport - she's trying to make everything into a human interest story. I mean, I don't mind a bit of backstory, but the balance of sport/chat ought to be at least 80% in sport's favour. It's less than 50/50 at the moment. However, there is the iplayer coverage, which ameliorates this a bit.
£3.99 for a Discovery Plus account and you can stream what you want with multiple, multiple cameras including every piece of Gym equipment.
Yet you still have to pay the BBC to not watch Balding.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
It would also need to be available to Non HS2 stock, if so it would be a much better solution than HS2 as planned, which would have been a bit of a pig in a poke.
They also need a connection at Curzon St to the Camp Hill line so that Crosscountry trains can use HS2 then head for Bristol.
As it stands 4 out of 7 platforms will be disused from day ;
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
Would have to be a pretty wide tunnel.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
The route I saw started in the South West (Airport) eventually ending somewhere in the North East (Rochdale / Bury way).
One of the advantages of Manchester is that the large conurbations to the west are on the South of Manchester while the accessible ones to the East are to the North. We can ignore Sheffield for obvious reasons...
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
If they were clever they would merge Tax and NI and up the tax allowance for people over 67 to £18,000 a year.
This would mean anyone of pension age with income up to £30k would be better off but early retirees and big public sector pension recipients get soaked.
Would still be very unpopular though.
I take it your pension is estimated to give you an income of £29,000 on retirement?
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
that makes sense now. If I'd known this I've forgotten.
You'd have thought that having paid a king's ransom for the rights, there'd be a marketing blitz to sell Discovery+ subscriptions to sports and Olympics-only fans, but what do I know?
The really curious bit is that they are running a discount scheme of £3.99 while the olympics are on. I think they have a lot to learn from Sky and elsewhere about event pricing..
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
26 committees 650 seats so you need 25 seats to get a committee chair...
Every time I turn on to BBC to see some olympics there's just people talking.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Bloody Claire Balding is bloody awful. She doesn't appear to actually like sport - she's trying to make everything into a human interest story. I mean, I don't mind a bit of backstory, but the balance of sport/chat ought to be at least 80% in sport's favour. It's less than 50/50 at the moment. However, there is the iplayer coverage, which ameliorates this a bit.
£3.99 for a Discovery Plus account and you can stream what you want with multiple, multiple cameras including every piece of Gym equipment.
Yet you still have to pay the BBC to not watch Balding.
Nice lady but I find her fundamentally trite and unwatchable.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
That sum paid by discovery was for the whole European rights package.
That’s a good point! I guess that by bidding for pan-EU rights Discovery was able to outbid local broadcasters everywhere?
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
that makes sense now. If I'd known this I've forgotten.
You'd have thought that having paid a king's ransom for the rights, there'd be a marketing blitz to sell Discovery+ subscriptions to sports and Olympics-only fans, but what do I know?
The really curious bit is that they are running a discount scheme of £3.99 while the olympics are on. I think they have a lot to learn from Sky and elsewhere about event pricing..
I'm guessing the idea is to get people to sign up during the Olympics, then hope to keep the subscriptions going afterwards?
Though I got a considerable discount signing up to Sky Sports last Ashes on Now TV, so Sky do similar too.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
Sending one of the military’s single most valuable human assets, trained over a period of years and at extortionate cost, to serve on the front lines of the meat grinder. What could possibly go wrong there?
A sure sign they’re unable to either field sufficient numbers of aircraft, or to recruit sufficient numbers of volunteer soldiers.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
Would have to be a pretty wide tunnel.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
The route I saw started in the South West (Airport) eventually ending somewhere in the North East (Rochdale / Bury way).
One of the advantages of Manchester is that the large conurbations to the west are on the South of Manchester while the accessible ones to the East are to the North. We can ignore Sheffield for obvious reasons...
The NPR (formerly HS2/NPR) tunnel alignment goes from the Airport via Piccadilly to Marsden (near Huddersfield). DfT proposals are that it pops up to the surface at Piccadilly and that there is a turnback station. GM contested this at Select Committee, preferring an underground through station. There was no outcome to this as HS2 was cancelled before Select Committee could deliver a conclusion. There is a firm alignment covered by the HS2 bill, which is proposed to be carried over to the NPR bill, for the Airport to Piccadilly bit - east of Piccadilly there is a line on a map but with no legislative weight yet attached to it, so the end result might vary considerably. (The Picc-Airport bit might also vary, but it is now more legislatively difficult for it to do so significantly). This will solve SOME of the demand issues in Central Manchester - possibly there may be a subsequent need for an E-W or a SE-NW tunnel as demand grows in the period to and beyond 2040, and/or a light rail tunnel to address demand issues on the light-suburban rail network. (There is overlap between these, of course, because demand can be met in varying ways - there is 'travel' demand rather than demand to travel on light or heavy rail.)
If that chart is slightly valid it seems the Conservatives need Jenrick.
In what way is Jenrick the change candidate?
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
Sadly we've no-one on here from Clacton. We could encourage a series of complaints about parking on the sea-front, the train service ad so on. Just to see what happens.
Actually, doesn't have to be from Clacton itself. We're more likely to have a Frinton resident!
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
that makes sense now. If I'd known this I've forgotten.
You'd have thought that having paid a king's ransom for the rights, there'd be a marketing blitz to sell Discovery+ subscriptions to sports and Olympics-only fans, but what do I know?
The really curious bit is that they are running a discount scheme of £3.99 while the olympics are on. I think they have a lot to learn from Sky and elsewhere about event pricing..
They are getting rid of Eurosport in the UK soon and folding it into their TNT Sports brand, so the expectation is to get a discount offer for that once you try and cancel your Eurosport subscription.
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
Sadly we've no-one on here from Clacton. We could encourage a series of complaints about parking on the sea-front, the train service ad so on. Just to see what happens.
Actually, doesn't have to be from Clacton itself. We're more likely to have a Frinton resident!
Yep. I doubt he will visit Clacton much either. I'm possibly being unfair as he hasn't really had a chance yet, but his track record in the EU was not encouraging. Grand standing, but no actual work.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
Time will show that you have got this wrong but no point arguing over it
Oh I may well have it wrong - but I seriously doubt it, go and watch the Wayve homepage video and imagine what would happen if the car hadn't slowed down as the pedestrian crossed the road.. Now work out whose insurance is paying for this...
Waymo looks to be gearing up to do Washington. And once it’s normalised with that kind of constituency it’ll flip from 'weird west coast tech thing' to 'the future - just unevenly distributed'.
And, of course, the big players can just self-insure….
Just an impression you sometimes give off @MaxPB and @BartholomewRoberts Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick. 👍
I am in agreement with Max and Bart. All benefits including child allowance and state pension should be means tested. At the same time end the myth about NI and accept it is just another tax. Scrap voluntary contributions and make the pension available to everyone who meets the means tested criteria irrespectve of how much they have worked or paid.
Easy to say when you are loaded, amazing the fcukwits on here , dripping with money who pontificate about taxing poor pensioners on a pitiful pension. Especially given they have paid 50 years for it.
Malcolm displaying his normal porridge brains lack of logic.
If I were loaded (which I am not) then I would be one of those losing any benefits or state pension. That is the whole point. Don't give benefits and state pension to those who don't need them.
Oh and the whole point of the original state pension system when it was set up post war was that current earners are paying for current pensioners, not saving for their own.
Why should someone earning £25K a year, unable to even think about getting on the housing ladder, be paying for the state pension of someone who already has a massive company pension and is living in a mortgage free house?
State handouts should be a safety net, nothing more. If you don't need them you don't get them. That way there is either more money to spend on those who do need it or you can reduce taxes. Eitrher is a better option than handing over taxpayers money to rich pensioners.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
Would have to be a pretty wide tunnel.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
The route I saw started in the South West (Airport) eventually ending somewhere in the North East (Rochdale / Bury way).
One of the advantages of Manchester is that the large conurbations to the west are on the South of Manchester while the accessible ones to the East are to the North. We can ignore Sheffield for obvious reasons...
The NPR (formerly HS2/NPR) tunnel alignment goes from the Airport via Piccadilly to Marsden (near Huddersfield). DfT proposals are that it pops up to the surface at Piccadilly and that there is a turnback station. GM contested this at Select Committee, preferring an underground through station. There was no outcome to this as HS2 was cancelled before Select Committee could deliver a conclusion. There is a firm alignment covered by the HS2 bill, which is proposed to be carried over to the NPR bill, for the Airport to Piccadilly bit - east of Piccadilly there is a line on a map but with no legislative weight yet attached to it, so the end result might vary considerably. (The Picc-Airport bit might also vary, but it is now more legislatively difficult for it to do so significantly). This will solve SOME of the demand issues in Central Manchester - possibly there may be a subsequent need for an E-W or a SE-NW tunnel as demand grows in the period to and beyond 2040, and/or a light rail tunnel to address demand issues on the light-suburban rail network. (There is overlap between these, of course, because demand can be met in varying ways - there is 'travel' demand rather than demand to travel on light or heavy rail.)
Experience elsewhere would suggest a through tunnel makes more sense - it's far cheaper to have a set of "platforms" outside the city centre to reverse a train than in the city centre. Such an approach would allow you to use 4 or 6 platforms underground instead of the 11 Euston needs.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
The main benefit of the Manchester tunnel is to provide critically needed capacity through that city to Crewe to allow more local and goods traffic. So high cost and high benefit but it is somewhat self contained from the rest of the HS2 business base and can be seen as part of the Northern upgrades.
Manchester is a bit that I think does actually require more thought - ideally it should be a tunnel through Manchester that then provides routes North (WCML / Scotland), East (NPR / Leeds), West (NPR / Liverpool) and South (HS2 / London). That one tunnel would then fix a whole set of issues in the Manchester area...
Would have to be a pretty wide tunnel.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
The route I saw started in the South West (Airport) eventually ending somewhere in the North East (Rochdale / Bury way).
One of the advantages of Manchester is that the large conurbations to the west are on the South of Manchester while the accessible ones to the East are to the North. We can ignore Sheffield for obvious reasons...
The NPR (formerly HS2/NPR) tunnel alignment goes from the Airport via Piccadilly to Marsden (near Huddersfield). DfT proposals are that it pops up to the surface at Piccadilly and that there is a turnback station. GM contested this at Select Committee, preferring an underground through station. There was no outcome to this as HS2 was cancelled before Select Committee could deliver a conclusion. There is a firm alignment covered by the HS2 bill, which is proposed to be carried over to the NPR bill, for the Airport to Piccadilly bit - east of Piccadilly there is a line on a map but with no legislative weight yet attached to it, so the end result might vary considerably. (The Picc-Airport bit might also vary, but it is now more legislatively difficult for it to do so significantly). This will solve SOME of the demand issues in Central Manchester - possibly there may be a subsequent need for an E-W or a SE-NW tunnel as demand grows in the period to and beyond 2040, and/or a light rail tunnel to address demand issues on the light-suburban rail network. (There is overlap between these, of course, because demand can be met in varying ways - there is 'travel' demand rather than demand to travel on light or heavy rail.)
Experience elsewhere would suggest a through tunnel makes more sense - it's far cheaper to have a set of "platforms" outside the city centre to reverse a train than in the city centre. Such an approach would allow you to use 4 or 6 platforms underground instead of the 11 Euston needs.
Absolutely. This point was made at some length at Select Committee. In my view, HS2 was left looking a bit daft. Its proposals were that for every single journey that passed through its proposed Piccadilly turnback station, a new driver would have to be waiting on the platform to clamber on and drive the train out the other way.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
There is a scenario in which the Russian situation in Ukraine worsens, and Chinese support for Russia is increasingly conditional. In that scenario, the absence of troops in Russia's far east starts to get more problematic.
As some point, Xi will start to take an interest in what’s just over his northern border. Lots of minerals there, would be a shame if anything happened to them.
Just an impression you sometimes give off @MaxPB and @BartholomewRoberts Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick. 👍
I am in agreement with Max and Bart. All benefits including child allowance and state pension should be means tested. At the same time end the myth about NI and accept it is just another tax. Scrap voluntary contributions and make the pension available to everyone who meets the means tested criteria irrespectve of how much they have worked or paid.
Easy to say when you are loaded, amazing the fcukwits on here , dripping with money who pontificate about taxing poor pensioners on a pitiful pension. Especially given they have paid 50 years for it.
Malcolm displaying his normal porridge brains lack of logic.
If I were loaded (which I am not) then I would be one of those losing any benefits or state pension. That is the whole point. Don't give benefits and state pension to those who don't need them.
Oh and the whole point of the original state pension system when it was set up post war was that current earners are paying for current pensioners, not saving for their own.
Why should someone earning £25K a year, unable to even think about getting on the housing ladder, be paying for the state pension of someone who already has a massive company pension and is living in a mortgage free house?
State handouts should be a safety net, nothing more. If you don't need them you don't get them. That way there is either more money to spend on those who do need it or you can reduce taxes. Eitrher is a better option than handing over taxpayers money to rich pensioners.
Quite so. I am pretty sure malc says he drives a Porsche. If as seems reasonably probable I have that sort of income at 67 I will either not take the state pension or pass it on to food banks. Ludicrous system ATM.
About par I would say. Reeves is trying to pin the blame for the tax rises on the previous government and is succeeding to some extent. But Labour will own any decisions from now on.
I think Labour will be pretty happy with these numbers and that the narrative holds but perhaps saw more pushback from Hunt then they were expecting.
Because the £22bn number is simply a lie.
It seems that Hunt didn't factor in this years pay rises when implementing the last NI cut..
Which is why the election was announced so suddenly when the pay review recommendations appeared in mid to late May.
I'm starting to think Hunt really deserves the rhyming version of his name.
I was thinking about this today.
If you are in a contentious negotiation of course you don’t want a line item saying “this is the money available”. But you should budget for it in the contingency - which is what I suspect they did (so Reeves is being cute by complaining the contingency has been spent but there is no line item for public sector pay increases).
In any event I would have sympathy for the Tories only factoring in 11% (which I think was their last offer) into the numbers.
Reeves needed to stretch the truth to get above £20bn which is what she was probably aiming for from a presentational perspective
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to scrap planned changes to the care system in England has been described as a "tragedy" by Sir Andrew Dilnot, the man who authored the proposals in 2011.
Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Sir Andrew said: "We've failed another generation of families."
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
The issue is that the IOC sold the rights regionally rather than in individual terriritories, so Discovery paid their billion for the right to the whole of Europe. They can’t have the exclusive in the UK because of legislation, so sold the minimum they could get away with to the BBC.
This could well be the last traditional TV deal, replaced in a few years time with everyone paying to steam it from Olympics.com.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
There is a scenario in which the Russian situation in Ukraine worsens, and Chinese support for Russia is increasingly conditional. In that scenario, the absence of troops in Russia's far east starts to get more problematic.
As some point, Xi will start to take an interest in what’s just over his northern border. Lots of minerals there, would be a shame if anything happened to them.
I'm surprised he hasn't already given how many Chinese companies and workers (especially workers) are already there
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
26 committees 650 seats so you need 25 seats to get a committee chair...
Yes but RefUK did get more votes than the LibDems. Of course, ours is a seats-based system but it is not a good look.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
The issue is that the IOC sold the rights regionally rather than in individual terriritories, so Discovery paid their billion for the right to the whole of Europe. They can’t have the exclusive in the UK because of legislation, so sold the minimum they could get away with to the BBC.
This could well be the last traditional TV deal, replaced in a few years time with everyone paying to steam it from Olympics.com.
And that will be the death of the Olympics. Most Olympics viewers watch sport, especially Olympics sports, once every four years. They aren't going to stump up the cash because, as we have already seen, most of them will not even know it is an option.
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
26 committees 650 seats so you need 25 seats to get a committee chair...
Yes but RefUK did get more votes than the LibDems. Of course, ours is a seats-based system but it is not a good look.
Its a perfectly good look.
Win seats.
Each MP is the most popular candidate in their area, they each earned their seat, whether you respect them or not. The Lib Dems got that far more then Refuk.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
The issue is that the IOC sold the rights regionally rather than in individual terriritories, so Discovery paid their billion for the right to the whole of Europe. They can’t have the exclusive in the UK because of legislation, so sold the minimum they could get away with to the BBC.
This could well be the last traditional TV deal, replaced in a few years time with everyone paying to steam it from Olympics.com.
They can try to stream it from olympics.com but they'll find that for the majority of people they'll not bother paying the extra. They may have a premium product but people are loathed to pay extra for something they previously got for free. it's not like people are likely to get it as part of a package (e.g. via a mobile phone contract).
for the foreseeable you'll get a repeat of this system, especially if the IOC continues to sell by region.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
Stalin had good relations with Hitler too. Until he didn’t. That’s the trouble forming alliances with psychopathic autocrats.
Who is who in this scenario ?
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
The areas of eastern Russia bordering China are very resource-rich, and many of the people who live there have much more in common with Chinese peoples than they do with the Muscovite slavs. There are many reason why China might covet those areas - especially as the west are unlikely to intervene on Russia's behalf as they might over Taiwan.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
There is a scenario in which the Russian situation in Ukraine worsens, and Chinese support for Russia is increasingly conditional. In that scenario, the absence of troops in Russia's far east starts to get more problematic.
As some point, Xi will start to take an interest in what’s just over his northern border. Lots of minerals there, would be a shame if anything happened to them.
As suggested when the SMO kicked off, all President Xi needed to do to undermine it is sail a fleet north towards the Arctic. The symbolism of passing that Russian coast would not have been lost on Putin.
Fundamentally, Russia is too big to defend easily because troops, planes and missile systems defending one point are too distant from another.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
Presumably its the cliff edge that you're worried about more than the extra 20% saving?
Make pension relief 20% and use that money to eliminate the cliff edges seems like a logical solution.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
You might not go for a 20% cut in income. But there will be many people who try quite hard to keep income under that level and choose to do less work as the amount they earn approaches the threshold. There are lots of ways this can be done. Many people will get to choose how much work they do. Personally, I'm through the stage of parenthood which demands a shortened working week. I could go back up to full hours. But I'm not going to do 10% more work for 5% more money. (Figures plucked out of my fat Mancunian arse.)
Not sure if this has been picked up already but the provisional Select Committee Chair allocations are on the Commons order paper today. Labour get 18, Conservatives 5 and Lib Dems 3. It's a brave new world folks.
Nothing for Farage? He'll be upset.
He wouldn't have turned up anyway. He never did the bread and butter work in the EU committees.
26 committees 650 seats so you need 25 seats to get a committee chair...
Yes but RefUK did get more votes than the LibDems. Of course, ours is a seats-based system but it is not a good look.
Select Committees are organs of the Commons. They have to represent the make-up of the Commons. The voting system should be reformed, but we are where we are.
One of the few parts of the UK system where votes matter over seats is the unwritten/unspecified notion that appointments to the Lords should somewhat reflect votes, which was supposedly the reason for lots of LibDem appointments to the Lords in 2010. There's maybe an argument there should be some RefUK Lords appointments in recognition of their large GE2024 vote share.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
The issue is that the IOC sold the rights regionally rather than in individual terriritories, so Discovery paid their billion for the right to the whole of Europe. They can’t have the exclusive in the UK because of legislation, so sold the minimum they could get away with to the BBC.
This could well be the last traditional TV deal, replaced in a few years time with everyone paying to steam it from Olympics.com.
They can try to stream it from olympics.com but they'll find that for the majority of people they'll not bother paying the extra. They may have a premium product but people are loathed to pay extra for something they previously got for free. it's not like people are likely to get it as part of a package (e.g. via a mobile phone contract).
for the foreseeable you'll get a repeat of this system, especially if the IOC continues to sell by region.
The most that would change (and probably should change) is a few announcements like C4 do on F1 that you can see the race live on Sky...
Comments
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
They need quite a few troops in their client statelets in North Ossetia and Transdnistria; and they've got imperial overseas forces in Africa and Syria and the like haven't they? (Granted some of these are Wagner but they're still Russian armed men).
NATO isn't going to invade, but Russia either believes or wants to maintain the fiction that it believes that they will.
I can't be alone in thinking this is far worse than previous years?
Under my proposal absolutely everyone - those on PAYE, the self-employed, pensioners etc would pay the exact same income tax rate (inc what then used to be called National Insurance).
Plus bonuses typically reduce tax take on National Insurance because of the upper limit counts only at the time the bonus is paid. If someone is on a salary of say £30k and gets a bonus in one month alone of £10k then they pay NI and Income Tax on the entirety of the salary, but they only pay 2% tax on most of the bonus as they've hit the upper earnings limit that month for NI.
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Apparently the BBC did not buy all the rights
I remember back in 2017 seeing a conference with various transport futurists, in which I think the median predicted date for autonomous vehicles outnumbering non-autonomous on the roads was 2024. Still five months to go...
@BartholomewRoberts suggestion does make sense in my opinion. Just get rid of it and increase the Income tax rate appropriately. Long overdue.
And overall numbers have significantly increased in recent years:
NHS staff numbers have increased, with doctor numbers up 26% and nurses up 24% over the five years to March 2024. The NHS vacancy rate was 6.9% in March 2024, down from 8.0% in March 2023.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7281/
Job vacancies, as well as being used for replacing the 'natural wastage' of the current workforce, are a feature of an expanding workforce.
So the easiest way to reduce NHS job vacancies would be to stop increasing the NHS workforce.
The fallacy of the thinking behind 'country X has more nurses and country Y has more doctors so we should have even more nurses and doctors' is it doesn't take into account cost effectiveness in a world of limited resources.
We could double spending on the NHS but how much improvement to the health of the population would that bring ? Certainly not 100%, in fact I doubt it would even be 10%. Meanwhile the opportunity cost of not using those extra resources elsewhere would be far higher.
https://x.com/benedictpringle/status/1818216317410791557
Hence a student will earn say £500 a week over the summer and so pay £20 a week or so of NI (8% of £250). But they will earn in total £10,000 over the summer so won't be paying Income tax...
I guess North Korea might go nuts & go for Vladivostok. That would be entertaining.
Xi isn't going to invade Russia, aside from what looks like a minor dispute over a single small island to China's northeast there's way more heat for Xi with Aksai Chin/India and obviously Taiwan/ the South China seas/USA. As for Russia invading China - that's laughable.
I mean, I don't mind a bit of backstory, but the balance of sport/chat ought to be at least 80% in sport's favour. It's less than 50/50 at the moment.
However, there is the iplayer coverage, which ameliorates this a bit.
They will feather the nests of their own supporters. Same sh1t, just different.
You should note that I don't include most Tesla incidents of this type as they have a habit of killing the driver so there is a bit of self inflicted no sympathy there..
Compare that to AI where the market seems very happy to sell systems that introduce complete fabrications as facts hoping that an initial reader will vet what was written before submitting it.
I reckon the only thing stopping Xi are Putin's nukes.
Mainline railway signalling systems require SIL4 (99.999 to 99.9999%) and that is of the whole system not just individual components.
Of course the Gov't does get employer NI
I get my bonus taxed at 22%. 2% NI plus 20% tax.
Because NI is calculated per pay period (so puts nearly all of it in the higher rate bracket), wheras tax is yearly so still in the 20% bracket.
It saved me about £1000 last year compared with what I would have paid in NI had it been paid monthly in twelths.
Plus you claimed bonuses, but bonuses are a way to game the system to reduce taxes not increase them, which is why Directors NI is annualised because otherwise they could easily give themselves their taxfree allowance each month then once a year a bonus for the rest of their income and face 2% tax on most of their earnings rather than the full rate.
Allowing students to annualise their tax-free allowance on NI would be a positive not a negative of my system in my view and much fairer than trying to take small amounts off students while ignoring the entire earnings of millions of people.
This would mean anyone of pension age with income up to £30k would be better off but early retirees and big public sector pension recipients get soaked.
Would still be very unpopular though.
The BBC got wildly outbid for the rights to Olympic coverage - €1.3billion for 2 summer & 2 winter games would require the BBC to spend a quarter of their annual budget purely on the Olympics. This was obviously untenable.
If you want to watch the whole Olympics you’re going to have to pay Warner Bros for the privilege unfortunately. I bet their commentary is terrible though.
PLus it does count for eligibility to a state pension. Which you may not like, granted.
So I would actually lose out quite badly if this happened.
Two intersecting tunnels sounds more likely to me.
Though actually why would you even want the lines to intersect? If you're tunnelling couldn't you have the East/West tunnel go above (or below) the North/South tunnel and then they could both be used simultaneously without signalling?
Rupert Harrison
@rbrharrison
I'm normally a big defender of the OBR as an institution but the timing of Richard Hughes' letter is an error that plays into Labour's fundamentally untrue narrative. He has allowed normal in-year spending pressures to be turned into a political scoring point. 1/
They also need a connection at Curzon St to the Camp Hill line so that Crosscountry trains can use HS2 then head for Bristol.
As it stands 4 out of 7 platforms will be disused from day ;
One of the advantages of Manchester is that the large conurbations to the west are on the South of Manchester while the accessible ones to the East are to the North. We can ignore Sheffield for obvious reasons...
The majority of people in this country have shockingly poor personal pensions & are basically reliant on the state pension.
Though I got a considerable discount signing up to Sky Sports last Ashes on Now TV, so Sky do similar too.
A sure sign they’re unable to either field sufficient numbers of aircraft, or to recruit sufficient numbers of volunteer soldiers.
Anyway, all good news for Ukraine.
DfT proposals are that it pops up to the surface at Piccadilly and that there is a turnback station. GM contested this at Select Committee, preferring an underground through station. There was no outcome to this as HS2 was cancelled before Select Committee could deliver a conclusion.
There is a firm alignment covered by the HS2 bill, which is proposed to be carried over to the NPR bill, for the Airport to Piccadilly bit - east of Piccadilly there is a line on a map but with no legislative weight yet attached to it, so the end result might vary considerably. (The Picc-Airport bit might also vary, but it is now more legislatively difficult for it to do so significantly).
This will solve SOME of the demand issues in Central Manchester - possibly there may be a subsequent need for an E-W or a SE-NW tunnel as demand grows in the period to and beyond 2040, and/or a light rail tunnel to address demand issues on the light-suburban rail network. (There is overlap between these, of course, because demand can be met in varying ways - there is 'travel' demand rather than demand to travel on light or heavy rail.)
Jenrick was caught up in questionable dealings with Richard Desmond (and others), was hopeless in his role as secretary of state for housing (described as "no help at all" by 90% of leaseholders), was caught out breaking lockdown rules during Covid, and is mostly remembered by the general public for painting over murals at a children's asylum seeker centre.
It seems to me, that in terms of giving the appearance of being venal, ineffectual, rule-flouting and cruel, Jenrick is very much the continuity candidate with respect to his party's perception by the general public.
Actually, doesn't have to be from Clacton itself. We're more likely to have a Frinton resident!
And, of course, the big players can just self-insure….
If I were loaded (which I am not) then I would be one of those losing any benefits or state pension. That is the whole point. Don't give benefits and state pension to those who don't need them.
Oh and the whole point of the original state pension system when it was set up post war was that current earners are paying for current pensioners, not saving for their own.
Why should someone earning £25K a year, unable to even think about getting on the housing ladder, be paying for the state pension of someone who already has a massive company pension and is living in a mortgage free house?
State handouts should be a safety net, nothing more. If you don't need them you don't get them. That way there is either more money to spend on those who do need it or you can reduce taxes. Eitrher is a better option than handing over taxpayers money to rich pensioners.
I am paying £19 a month for unlimited calls, texts, and data.
They also chucked in free roaming and Apple Music worth £10.99 a month.
If you are in a contentious negotiation of course you don’t want a line item saying “this is the money available”. But you should budget for it in the contingency - which is what I suspect they did (so Reeves is being cute by complaining the contingency has been spent but there is no line item for public sector pay increases).
In any event I would have sympathy for the Tories only factoring in 11% (which I think was their last offer) into the numbers.
Reeves needed to stretch the truth to get above £20bn which is what she was probably aiming for from a presentational perspective
Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Sir Andrew said: "We've failed another generation of families."
BBC News
This could well be the last traditional TV deal, replaced in a few years time with everyone paying to steam it from Olympics.com.
And am I being uncharitable in also believing that politicians have often been, at best, indifferent to the effect of poverty traps.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
Win seats.
Each MP is the most popular candidate in their area, they each earned their seat, whether you respect them or not. The Lib Dems got that far more then Refuk.
for the foreseeable you'll get a repeat of this system, especially if the IOC continues to sell by region.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
Fundamentally, Russia is too big to defend easily because troops, planes and missile systems defending one point are too distant from another.
Make pension relief 20% and use that money to eliminate the cliff edges seems like a logical solution.
Personally, I'm through the stage of parenthood which demands a shortened working week. I could go back up to full hours. But I'm not going to do 10% more work for 5% more money. (Figures plucked out of my fat Mancunian arse.)
One of the few parts of the UK system where votes matter over seats is the unwritten/unspecified notion that appointments to the Lords should somewhat reflect votes, which was supposedly the reason for lots of LibDem appointments to the Lords in 2010. There's maybe an argument there should be some RefUK Lords appointments in recognition of their large GE2024 vote share.