One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The Welsh Highland and Ffestiniog Railway provide an amazing tourist attraction but also act as public transport to the towns and villages they pass through from March to October
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
Using the old cliche of the lottery of life, the problem is that our postindustrial society has scrapped all of the smaller prizes and concentrated the pay outs into a smaller range of big jackpots. It used to be if your circumstances, intelligence, willpower or whatever (not here to make the argument as to which is more important) weren't sufficient to win you the big prize of a white collar professional job then at least there were other jobs you could get that would give you security and a decent living. What are today's equivalent of Starmer pere's toolmaking or panel fitting in a car factory?
There's actually a large a growing market for manual skills combined with brain work. The carpenter/cabinet maker who can measure up and room, design and custom make shelves. Things like that - good money in it.
There is a growing market in striping, respraying and reworking old wood furniture. Both onsite in people's homes and at workshops.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
One more lane bro.
The issue is that while motorways increase capacity between cities, they do nothing to improve capacity in the cities themselves. For example, the Edinburgh bypass made it easier for people to commute to the business parks in the west, and for people to come in from Fife., the Lothians etc. Great!
But now the city itself is incredibly congested and the bypass is clogged up with commuters rather than commercial traffic.
For fifty years my grandad walked to his workplace, walked to his local pub, walked to his local shop, walked to the local shop, walked to see his relatives. It was a limited life.
How many people can or want to live like that now ?
This is the era of commuters - for work, for shopping, for education, for entertainment, for family.
One thing I would suggest would reduce congestion is more flexible hours - working from home is an aspect of this.
How is that a limited life? Sounds great. It's my life right now. And according to polls, a large majority want to live like this too. (Add doctors, pharmacy, dentist, bakery, community garden, church, and 4 more pubs).
I use my car at the weekends to visit family or to head to the hills (and even then I'll use the train if possible, so I can post on PB on the way to Corrour station). My partner uses it when there isn't a late train back from whatever regional hospital the NHS have sent her too.
I remember one of your visitors from Moscow tried this line a while back.
JD Vance tells Steve Bannon today that people in Washington want to cut Social Security benefits to then give that money to Ukraine so Zelensky’s ministers can buy yachts.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
Except that isn't remotely an accurate summary of the evidence as we know it. I deal with facts on these things precisely because there is no belief. Either COVID originated in the lab or it didn't. It originated in a market or it didn't. What you and I believe has no bearing.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Norwich lose. On the eve of what promises to be a very long and difficult season for Ipswich I’ll take what I can get.
I am 100% confident that Leicester will be the strongest team in the Premier League, like Atlas we will be the base holding up the division.
We are skint, face a points deduction, have lost more and better players than we have signed and have a useless manager who has had a disaster of a pre-season. Our fans will be restive from the off. As far as I can discern the plan is to bank the TV money, take a Truss like beating and get relegated but be solvent.
So Ipswich will at least be 19th, and probably significantly higher.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
Using the old cliche of the lottery of life, the problem is that our postindustrial society has scrapped all of the smaller prizes and concentrated the pay outs into a smaller range of big jackpots. It used to be if your circumstances, intelligence, willpower or whatever (not here to make the argument as to which is more important) weren't sufficient to win you the big prize of a white collar professional job then at least there were other jobs you could get that would give you security and a decent living. What are today's equivalent of Starmer pere's toolmaking or panel fitting in a car factory?
There's actually a large a growing market for manual skills combined with brain work. The carpenter/cabinet maker who can measure up and room, design and custom make shelves. Things like that - good money in it.
There is a growing market in striping, respraying and reworking old wood furniture. Both onsite in people's homes and at workshops.
Those are good examples and of course there are still plenty of skilled manual jobs out there that earn good money. That recent South Park episode about plumbers illustrates that point nicely. As things stand though it's nowhere near the amount of skilled manual work that used to be available prior to the early 80s. It's why I think it's very difficult to do anything for that bottom 10 to 15 percent. If the jobs aren't there then there is only so much a government can do.
Norwich lose. On the eve of what promises to be a very long and difficult season for Ipswich I’ll take what I can get.
I am 100% confident that Leicester will be the strongest team in the Premier League, like Atlas we will be the base holding up the division.
We are skint, face a points deduction, have lost more and better players than we have signed and have a useless manager who has had a disaster of a pre-season. Our fans will be restive from the off. As far as I can discern the plan is to bank the TV money, take a Truss like beating and get relegated but be solvent.
So Ipswich will at least be 19th, and probably significantly higher.
We have, thankfully, become and very well run and coached club but this promotion simply came too soon. And relying on other clubs’ points deductions just seems…wrong. I’m genuinely sorry to hear about Leicester’s travails.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
That Landmark Trust cottage I mentioned the other day - ten minute walk from the car parking area or dropped outside the door by the Ffestiniog train ...
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
Using the old cliche of the lottery of life, the problem is that our postindustrial society has scrapped all of the smaller prizes and concentrated the pay outs into a smaller range of big jackpots. It used to be if your circumstances, intelligence, willpower or whatever (not here to make the argument as to which is more important) weren't sufficient to win you the big prize of a white collar professional job then at least there were other jobs you could get that would give you security and a decent living. What are today's equivalent of Starmer pere's toolmaking or panel fitting in a car factory?
There's actually a large a growing market for manual skills combined with brain work. The carpenter/cabinet maker who can measure up and room, design and custom make shelves. Things like that - good money in it.
There is a growing market in striping, respraying and reworking old wood furniture. Both onsite in people's homes and at workshops.
Those are good examples and of course there are still plenty of skilled manual jobs out there that earn good money. That recent South Park episode about plumbers illustrates that point nicely. As things stand though it's nowhere near the amount of skilled manual work that used to be available prior to the early 80s. It's why I think it's very difficult to do anything for that bottom 10 to 15 percent. If the jobs aren't there then there is only so much a government can do.
There are tons of such jobs going begging for people. Get a CORGI gas certificate and become a plumber. I've never heard of a plumber doing other than turning work away.
There is *more* skilled work than the 80s - but it's a combination of manual skill and brain power required, rather than just dumbly repeat operation X on a manual lathe day after day.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
During the pandemic I got addicted to the city building game Cities Skylines which allows you to introduce a scheduled blimp service as a public transport option.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
That's exactly the problem - it's a classic case of tragedy of the commons. As people have become richer and driving cheaper, driving has become relatively more attractive than other options and thus our cities and towns have become clogged up.
This is a massive burden the economy, particularly with delays to commercial traffic. A double decker bus at rush hour can take about 80 cars off the road (and out of parking spaces), but bus services have been halved over the last 14 years.
My local retail is doing brilliantly because people can actually get to the High Street via bus, cycling, walking and tram.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Not in inner London (or I imagine the metropolitan cores of several other cities). People in different places have different lives. Here local independent retail has rebounded in the last decade. People shop for their daily needs, rather than doing the weekly shop as they used to in the 80s and 90s.
I did a school geography project back in about 1991 about the hollowing out of Rugby town centre and the rise of out of town shopping. It was already a thing back then. Thankfully we did t take things as far as the US.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
Especially as we have no shortage of hot air on environmental matters.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Actually, it does - the slower an electric car goes it becomes more efficient. There have been some road tests/competitions in Australia of getting insane miles per charge by crawling along.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
A possible third explanation is that the virus didn't start in Wuhan at all and was brought there by a traveller. The evidence for a zoonosis, probably market origin is compelling on my assessment
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
That, in essence, is the problem. They don’t need to be filled with hydrogen but that one disaster wiped out an entire industry. Imagine if plane crashes had that effect on aviation.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Norwich lose. On the eve of what promises to be a very long and difficult season for Ipswich I’ll take what I can get.
I am 100% confident that Leicester will be the strongest team in the Premier League, like Atlas we will be the base holding up the division.
We are skint, face a points deduction, have lost more and better players than we have signed and have a useless manager who has had a disaster of a pre-season. Our fans will be restive from the off. As far as I can discern the plan is to bank the TV money, take a Truss like beating and get relegated but be solvent.
So Ipswich will at least be 19th, and probably significantly higher.
Cooper is a decent manager. Might not be enough of course.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
During the pandemic I got addicted to the city building game Cities Skylines which allows you to introduce a scheduled blimp service as a public transport option.
I have (checks steam) an embarrassing number of hours playing it.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Actually, it does - the slower an electric car goes it becomes more efficient. There have been some road tests/competitions in Australia of getting insane miles per charge by crawling along.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
That would be an interesting advert. "Perfect for crawling along at 10mph!"
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
There's a variant of the meritocracy - defended from the Left.
In Hampstead, for example, there is a group who are oh so proud that their children attend the local school. Good luck getting into that school unless you happen to live in a house that costs more than a million. There aren't any for miles. Though the servants of the really rich live in, so their children get to go. So there's that.
You also see in media and arts a ferocious system of cronyism - starter jobs are now paid and mostly go to the scions of other families In The Thing.
Ironically, in the City, such practises have largely been banned. After a period of degree credentialism (couldn't get a job sorting post in a bank without a degree) - apprenticeships are coming in.
I caused an upset at a recent meeting on inclusion though. I pointed out the gaps in the proudly displayed slide of about 20 social and ethnic groups that inclusion team had found in the bank....
Certainly so. The media and arts are some of the least meritocratic sectors of society.
It may be true of The City, and is certainly true of my profession that we make conscious efforts to recruit unrecognised talent (with plenty of squealing from the privately educated when we do).
That though is very much the approach of my second link, and why it fails to tackle the real inequality at the bottom. The problem isn't Johnny with only BBB in his A levels, it is those that have no GCSEs at all.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Actually, it does - the slower an electric car goes it becomes more efficient. There have been some road tests/competitions in Australia of getting insane miles per charge by crawling along.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
That would be an interesting advert. "Perfect for crawling along at 10mph!"
*Cyclist whizzes past*
If the roads are that congested then you need to ban or inflict a congestion charge on the EVs anyway and make the owners take the bus.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
Norwich lose. On the eve of what promises to be a very long and difficult season for Ipswich I’ll take what I can get.
I am 100% confident that Leicester will be the strongest team in the Premier League, like Atlas we will be the base holding up the division.
We are skint, face a points deduction, have lost more and better players than we have signed and have a useless manager who has had a disaster of a pre-season. Our fans will be restive from the off. As far as I can discern the plan is to bank the TV money, take a Truss like beating and get relegated but be solvent.
So Ipswich will at least be 19th, and probably significantly higher.
We have, thankfully, become and very well run and coached club but this promotion simply came too soon. And relying on other clubs’ points deductions just seems…wrong. I’m genuinely sorry to hear about Leicester’s travails.
Enjoy your time in the sun! 🌞
Supporting Leicester has always been a wild ride, but we always bounce back. Neither victory nor defeat are ever permanent.
Funny to realize that there are more people employed in the automotive industry in the 10m Czechia (150k directly + more in attached supply chains) than in Ohio, Michigan, California, and Alabama combined https://x.com/Habsburguista/status/1822320528566235303
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
As, probably, did this. But they may have been animals in a lab in Wuhan.
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Actually, it does - the slower an electric car goes it becomes more efficient. There have been some road tests/competitions in Australia of getting insane miles per charge by crawling along.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
Stop/start city driving is exactly where you’d want an electric car, it’s brilliant at doing slow driving.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Actually, it does - the slower an electric car goes it becomes more efficient. There have been some road tests/competitions in Australia of getting insane miles per charge by crawling along.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
That would be an interesting advert. "Perfect for crawling along at 10mph!"
*Cyclist whizzes past*
If the roads are that congested then you need to ban or inflict a congestion charge on the EVs anyway and make the owners take the bus.
Average speeds in London, 7am to 7pm - 8mph in central, 12mph inner, 20mph outer.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart).
I have spent the last thirty five years covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
So something is being used and your big idea is to shut it down ???
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
I am not suggesting targeted road building is stopped, but added value must be considered. I would be more than happy to see the M4 divert south of Newport but more roads encourage more traffic. You could build half a dozen concentric motorways around London and in ten years they would be full. Rail for passengers and freight should be the focus. By passes are so 1970s and if you want local retail businesses to struggle, stick a by pass around a town so no one stops.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
Why would I want to use a bus or an electric bike when I have an electric car ?
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
Because an electric car has no discernible benefit over an ICE car in a traffic jam.
Unless its raining or if I want to listen to the radio.
I'd also settle for all the other benefits in exchange for the five minutes a week I tend to spend in traffic jams.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
Ignore and he’ll find something else to fixate on. There’s a big election coming up in the US I understand.
The thing is, I reckon that there's a method in Musk's nastiness.
Musk wants Trump/GOP to win. He's made that clear. Whether that is because a deal has been done, or he likes their anti-woman policies (*), or some other thing, I don't know. But there is a chance that the Dems might win, and that might be bad for him if he has attacked them too much.
So instead of fully attacking them head-on, he's attacking a newly-elected leftish government in a country with close social and historic links to the USA - us. We are an exemplar for the USA, with a left government. And we are powerless to stop him trashing our reputation.
And make no mistake: he is harming the UK.
(*) He thinks the US should have a billion people in it, likes people to have large families, and is rabidly anti-immigration (except for him and his buds, of course). It's hard to square these without thinking he wants women to be baby-making machines - and the GOP's current policies are heading that way.
I think you're right.
Being fundamentally ignorant of, and uninterested in, foreign countries, Americans are only capable of thinking about foreign political debates in American terms, despite very different national contexts making those thoughts completely irrelevant. They make arguments about foreign politics to score points in American political debates.
You saw it on the American Left with the New York Times and Brexit - they conflated Brexit with Donald Trump, and being vehemently against the latter, had to discredit the former, so argue that nothing good has happened in the UK since 2016, even though the two are very tenuously connected if at all.
Now you see it on the Right with Musk, Vance, Trump, etc., arguing that this country is about to become an Islamist dictatorship with no free speech to discredit the Democrats in the current electoral cycle.
But of course in both cases they are saying more about America's staggering ignorance, insularity and shallowness than they are about us. Like small children, ignore them and eventually they'll shut up.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
During the pandemic I got addicted to the city building game Cities Skylines which allows you to introduce a scheduled blimp service as a public transport option.
I have (checks steam) an embarrassing number of hours playing it.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is an even nerdier micromanagement sim if Cities Skylines floats your boat. Sort of somewhere between Cities Skylines and the old Transport Tycoon games (which is now free to play as OpenTTD if you fancy some 90s nostalgia!).
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
Also on the Aire in Leeds. They used to be free, but alas no more.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
The boats are interesting - a catamaran hull with the outside relatively flat, and all the curve on the inside. So all the water displacement is between the hulls and hits each other and kind of cancels out about 80% of the wake. Which means they can go quite fast without causing big waves.
Very good service. Should be ripe for electrification - the noise of the diesels is annoying.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
During the pandemic I got addicted to the city building game Cities Skylines which allows you to introduce a scheduled blimp service as a public transport option.
I have (checks steam) an embarrassing number of hours playing it.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is an even nerdier micromanagement sim if Cities Skylines floats your boat. Sort of somewhere between Cities Skylines and the old Transport Tycoon games (which is now free to play as OpenTTD if you fancy some 90s nostalgia!).
That's been on my to-do list for a while but I'm going through a Rimworld phase
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
I’m took it a few times when I lived in Greenwich but only when there were problems on the line into London Bridge and/or the DLR.
When working at Canary Wharf, I used to treat myself on a summer Friday to the Clipper to Putney Bridge. Slower than the tube, but you are sitting outside, with a beer.
Then go to the Vault at Putney Pies - sit by the river and have a few more beers....
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
The boats are interesting - a catamaran hull with the outside relatively flat, and all the curve on the inside. So all the water displacement is between the hulls and hits each other and kind of cancels out about 80% of the wake. Which means they can go quite fast without causing big waves.
Very good service. Should be ripe for electrification - the noise of the diesels is annoying.
EDIT: The boat design was Australian. They had a version in Sydney harbour that hit 50 knots. The problem was that you couldn't let people outside at those speeds.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
My daughter in law commutes by sea bus from North Vancouver to Vancouver every day she is working in Vancouver
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
We have water taxis in Cardiff Bay. Not so sure about reinstating the Hindenburg.
I think they had one in London - from somewhere like Somerset House to Greenwich or Woolwich - about 20-30 years ago. Didn't do well. I wonde rhow it would do with all the new houses down river, eg at the Arsenal, or are they all empty investment flats?
You can commute by boat in London. It's great fun (did it for 3 weeks, surprising volume of wildlife!)
I’m took it a few times when I lived in Greenwich but only when there were problems on the line into London Bridge and/or the DLR.
When working at Canary Wharf, I used to treat myself on a summer Friday to the Clipper to Putney Bridge. Slower than the tube, but you are sitting outside, with a beer.
Then go to the Vault at Putney Pies - sit by the river and have a few more beers....
I used the Thames Clipper once on a work trip to London when I was able to book the Doubletree at Chelsea Harbour for less than a Travelodge in town.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
To be clear there is zero evidence of labs working on the same virus in labs 300 metres away. Speculation yes; evidence none. If we don't get the facts right there's no point discussing this
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
Using the old cliche of the lottery of life, the problem is that our postindustrial society has scrapped all of the smaller prizes and concentrated the pay outs into a smaller range of big jackpots. It used to be if your circumstances, intelligence, willpower or whatever (not here to make the argument as to which is more important) weren't sufficient to win you the big prize of a white collar professional job then at least there were other jobs you could get that would give you security and a decent living. What are today's equivalent of Starmer pere's toolmaking or panel fitting in a car factory?
I would have thought jobs in construction, plumbing, doing up people's homes etc are skilled jobs that can pay reasonably well and require very little formal education.
What we need to do is make it easy for people to retrain into these skills, and not to bring in migrants as the first and last answer.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
To be clear there is zero evidence of labs working on the same virus in labs 300 metres away. Speculation yes; evidence none. If we don't get the facts right there's no point discussing this
I don't actually want to discuss it - there's nothing more tiresome than discussing things with people who don't actually believe what they're peddling.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Or even years. I wonder if we'll get people pushing Skysteading to go along with Seasteding.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
To be clear there is zero evidence of labs working on the same virus in labs 300 metres away. Speculation yes; evidence none. If we don't get the facts right there's no point discussing this
I don't actually want to discuss it - there's nothing more tiresome than discussing things with people who don't actually believe what they're peddling.
Yes there is. Discussing stuff with true believers like yourself.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
To be clear there is zero evidence of labs working on the same virus in labs 300 metres away. Speculation yes; evidence none. If we don't get the facts right there's no point discussing this
I don't actually want to discuss it - there's nothing more tiresome than discussing things with people who don't actually believe what they're peddling.
Look if you can provide a shred of evidence for your claimed fact we can discuss it. Otherwise it doesn't exist. I repeat belief doesn't come into it.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Modern weather forecasting?
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Modern weather forecasting?
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
72 hours is plenty if you’re talking landing conditions for an airship.
More than 72 hours isn’t astrology. There is incredible accuracy in the main global weather models now - same accuracy at 5 data as there was at 1 day in the 90s.
My experience as a rather geeky model watcher several times daily is that there’s pretty good predictability of the synoptic pattern up to about 180 hours after which models start to diverge.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like - we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion. I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
Build ladders
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Can I ask a simple question, what size pension pot do you think is sufficient to retire on?
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Nope - the problem is the lack of really still days in most places. A breeze that a light aircraft will laugh at will wreck an airship - it’s surface vs thrust that is the unfixable problem.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
The problem is that we are a partial meritocracy (partial because there are plenty of people at the top through connections, inheritance or family). Now if you actually read the book that popularised the term "meritocracy" it is a warning about the problem of meritocracy, and ends in revolution, nonetheless we continually hear politicians talk of "meritocracy" as a good thing.
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
Using the old cliche of the lottery of life, the problem is that our postindustrial society has scrapped all of the smaller prizes and concentrated the pay outs into a smaller range of big jackpots. It used to be if your circumstances, intelligence, willpower or whatever (not here to make the argument as to which is more important) weren't sufficient to win you the big prize of a white collar professional job then at least there were other jobs you could get that would give you security and a decent living. What are today's equivalent of Starmer pere's toolmaking or panel fitting in a car factory?
Getting a golden ticket to Love Island or being one of the rare few to make it as a Premier League Footballer? Or else being a plumber in London and the Home Counties
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like - we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion. I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
Build ladders
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Can I ask a simple question, what size pension pot do you think is sufficient to retire on?
One that can provide accommodation, food and bills. As a start.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Nope - the problem is the lack of really still days in most places. A breeze that a light aircraft will laugh at will wreck an airship - it’s surface vs thrust that is the unfixable problem.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
Use helicopters to transfer passengers and supplies to the airship, then it can stay aloft.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Nope - the problem is the lack of really still days in most places. A breeze that a light aircraft will laugh at will wreck an airship - it’s surface vs thrust that is the unfixable problem.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
Use helicopters to transfer passengers and supplies to the airship, then it can stay aloft.
Or use one of these salmon cannon things, but for people:
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like - we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion. I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
Build ladders
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Can I ask a simple question, what size pension pot do you think is sufficient to retire on?
One that can provide accommodation, food and bills. As a start.
How are generation rent going to manage that?
They aren't - and they have zero reason to save so may as well live in the moment...
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like - we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion. I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
Build ladders
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Can I ask a simple question, what size pension pot do you think is sufficient to retire on?
One that can provide accommodation, food and bills. As a start.
How are generation rent going to manage that?
They aren't - and they have zero reason to save so may as well live in the moment...
Introducing a bit of Buddhist philosophy there I see.
Comments
There is a growing market in striping, respraying and reworking old wood furniture. Both onsite in people's homes and at workshops.
I use my car at the weekends to visit family or to head to the hills (and even then I'll use the train if possible, so I can post on PB on the way to Corrour station). My partner uses it when there isn't a late train back from whatever regional hospital the NHS have sent her too.
The funniest bit was that it was smaller than the kind of house a really junior US Congressman would have.
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism
- Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals
- It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
We are skint, face a points deduction, have lost more and better players than we have signed and have a useless manager who has had a disaster of a pre-season. Our fans will be restive from the off. As far as I can discern the plan is to bank the TV money, take a Truss like beating and get relegated but be solvent.
So Ipswich will at least be 19th, and probably significantly higher.
Local retail is going to continue to decline - people prefer supermarkets and the internet.
More people, more congestion. Transport, housing, public services the same applies. If demand rises quicker than supply then pressures on usage occur.
and become a plumber. I've never heard of a plumber doing other than turning work away.
There is *more* skilled work than the 80s - but it's a combination of manual skill and brain power required, rather than just dumbly repeat operation X on a manual lathe day after day.
This is a massive burden the economy, particularly with delays to commercial traffic. A double decker bus at rush hour can take about 80 cars off the road (and out of parking spaces), but bus services have been halved over the last 14 years.
My local retail is doing brilliantly because people can actually get to the High Street via bus, cycling, walking and tram.
I did a school geography project back in about 1991 about the hollowing out of Rugby town centre and the rise of out of town shopping. It was already a thing back then. Thankfully we did t take things as far as the US.
Makes sense to me.
Electric cars are also ideal for frequent stop/start driving.
*Cyclist whizzes past*
It may be true of The City, and is certainly true of my profession that we make conscious efforts to recruit unrecognised talent (with plenty of squealing from the privately educated when we do).
That though is very much the approach of my second link, and why it fails to tackle the real inequality at the bottom. The problem isn't Johnny with only BBB in his A levels, it is those that have no GCSEs at all.
We literally have NO FUCKING CLUE what the terms of the GOP candidate's sweetheart deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is. NO FUCKING CLUE.
Why are we letting Trump distract everyone with a tantrum about whether Willie Brown was on his plane or his helicopter 40 years ago?
https://x.com/emptywheel/status/1822325309724635213
Insider Advantage
Wisconsin Trump 49% Harris 48%
Michigan Harris 49% Trump 47%
Trafalgar
North Carolina Trump 49% Harris 45%
Nevada Trump 48% Harris 45%
Pennsylvania Trump 46% Harris 44%
Arizona Trump 48% Harris 47%
https://pollingplus.com/news/pollingplus-exclusive-top-two-p
Supporting Leicester has always been a wild ride, but we always bounce back. Neither victory nor defeat are ever permanent.
https://x.com/Habsburguista/status/1822320528566235303
https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map
Pity the Artillery Museum is now closed ...
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
I'd also settle for all the other benefits in exchange for the five minutes a week I tend to spend in traffic jams.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4929475#Comment_4929475
Being fundamentally ignorant of, and uninterested in, foreign countries, Americans are only capable of thinking about foreign political debates in American terms, despite very different national contexts making those thoughts completely irrelevant. They make arguments about foreign politics to score points in American political debates.
You saw it on the American Left with the New York Times and Brexit - they conflated Brexit with Donald Trump, and being vehemently against the latter, had to discredit the former, so argue that nothing good has happened in the UK since 2016, even though the two are very tenuously connected if at all.
Now you see it on the Right with Musk, Vance, Trump, etc., arguing that this country is about to become an Islamist dictatorship with no free speech to discredit the Democrats in the current electoral cycle.
But of course in both cases they are saying more about America's staggering ignorance, insularity and shallowness than they are about us. Like small children, ignore them and eventually they'll shut up.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
The boats are interesting - a catamaran hull with the outside relatively flat, and all the curve on the inside. So all the water displacement is between the hulls and hits each other and kind of cancels out about 80% of the wake. Which means they can go quite fast without causing big waves.
Very good service. Should be ripe for electrification - the noise of the diesels is annoying.
Then go to the Vault at Putney Pies - sit by the river and have a few more beers....
At some point it must feel more like an extended sprint though!
A very pleasant way to commute.
I'm aiming to do about 27-28 mins for a 5K tomorrow, although after a little swim and run.
Incidentally, under 19 mins would have had you in the top 3 or 4 at my last triathlon.
What we need to do is make it easy for people to retrain into these skills, and not to bring in migrants as the first and last answer.
You’re mired in the last century.
Discussing stuff with true believers like yourself.
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
Of course in 2016 Trafalgar was right, the only pollster with Trump ahead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/pennsylvania/trump-vs-harrishttps://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/arizona/trump-vs-harris
Synchronised swimming on the radio.
More than 72 hours isn’t astrology. There is incredible accuracy in the main global weather models now - same accuracy at 5 data as there was at 1 day in the 90s.
My experience as a rather geeky model watcher several times daily is that there’s pretty good predictability of the synoptic pattern up to about 180 hours after which models start to diverge.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
How are generation rent going to manage that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3ZyGlqUkA
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/pennsylvania/trump-vs-harris