"Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch has defended MPs taking freebie tickets to events, saying it allows them to spend time with their families.
The Conservatives have accused Labour of being "a government of self-service" and "living the high life" since details emerged of donations to senior figures in the party - including tickets for Sir Keir Starmer to watch football matches and see Taylor Swift in concert.
But while Ms Badenoch accused the new government of "hypocrisy" for taking donations, she also stood by her own register of interests that shows she had taken tickets and hospitality for a rugby game, the Jingle Bell Ball concert, and Ed Sheeran."
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
It is true, and I am claiming it as are many others.
Underrated question. If they think there’s a genuine chance of Trump winning - which there certainly is - then this would be among the most consequential of all his policies in terms of the impact on the majority of Americans.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
See my point earlier that the complete and utter success of the Elizabeth line isn't being mentioned to avoid Crossrail 2 / 3 discussions.
Both of which should be in progress...
Heck if you rolled the Euston underground changes into CR2 (as was the original plan) Euston would start to look affordable...
It's politics (and the high cost of public debt too, tbh) holding Crossrail 2 back.
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
The Elizabeth Line has been an absolute game changer for me…
Underrated question. If they think there’s a genuine chance of Trump winning - which there certainly is - then this would be among the most consequential of all his policies in terms of the impact on the majority of Americans.
Like most Trump policies there is )% chance of it being implemented. The only policies you can be sure he would fully implement are the Trump enrichment policies.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
On safety of cycle lanes for @Eabhal and @Taz , it was Transport for London not Active Travel England.
They published data in around 2009 that "painted on the road" cycle lanes were associated with increased casualties for people riding cycles.
Here most people cycle on the pavement because that is where the Council seem to want them.
At around the same time they published date showing that removing "fences to restrain pedestrians at road junctions" (ie the railings on central pedestrian 'refuges' etc) reduced casualties for pedestrians.
15 years later, up and down the country Local Highways Authorities continue to install them "keep pedestrians safe". If I suggested removing them here at similar junctions the Council would have a brainstorm.
I'd need to look around find the links.
Interesting on cycle lanes. The new one in Gateshead has seen the pavement widened instead of being on road. I don’t like it as I’m having to approach every road or business that comes off the main road may have a car suddenly pop out.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
But it's demonstrably true. Business cases are based on costs vs benefits. Benefits are calculated, largely, on passenger numbers. And passenger numbers have wildly exceeded expectations. No doubt TfL have produced an assessment.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
See my point earlier that the complete and utter success of the Elizabeth line isn't being mentioned to avoid Crossrail 2 / 3 discussions.
Both of which should be in progress...
Heck if you rolled the Euston underground changes into CR2 (as was the original plan) Euston would start to look affordable...
It's politics (and the high cost of public debt too, tbh) holding Crossrail 2 back.
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
On a spreadsheet, investment in London always looks brilliant because you get these insane returns. But over time, that just means the gap between the SE and the rest of the UK grows and grows, and resentment builds.
The difficulty is achieving a critical mass of infrastructure in the North - a couple of tram lines, a dozen bus routes is a waste of cash.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
See my point earlier that the complete and utter success of the Elizabeth line isn't being mentioned to avoid Crossrail 2 / 3 discussions.
Both of which should be in progress...
Heck if you rolled the Euston underground changes into CR2 (as was the original plan) Euston would start to look affordable...
It's politics (and the high cost of public debt too, tbh) holding Crossrail 2 back.
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
Oh I don't disagree with that - the problem is we shouldn't even have to think about these either or choices - it should be we are building metros in Manchester and Leeds while also building CR2 in London.
I'm starting to think that the best thing possible thing in this budget would be:-
replace council tax with a 0.5% house value tax that went to central government x% of income tax given to local authorities with the ability for them to raise an additional y% for local transport or similar projects...
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
It is true, and I am claiming it as are many others.
Sure, but you're not accountable. They're spending a lot on making the Elizabeth line run well, and still they're not entirely succeeding. The project itself has clearly worked wonderfully - I'm not so sure about it's management.
No private companies are clamouring to build Crossrail2 are they?
Underrated question. If they think there’s a genuine chance of Trump winning - which there certainly is - then this would be among the most consequential of all his policies in terms of the impact on the majority of Americans.
Like most Trump policies there is )% chance of it being implemented. The only policies you can be sure he would fully implement are the Trump enrichment policies.
Are you sure about that ? This time round he has an entire administration in waiting jonesing for it, and a Supreme Court which will very likely back him up.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
See my point earlier that the complete and utter success of the Elizabeth line isn't being mentioned to avoid Crossrail 2 / 3 discussions.
Both of which should be in progress...
Heck if you rolled the Euston underground changes into CR2 (as was the original plan) Euston would start to look affordable...
It's politics (and the high cost of public debt too, tbh) holding Crossrail 2 back.
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
On a spreadsheet, investment in London always looks brilliant because you get these insane returns. But over time, that just means the gap between the SE and the rest of the UK grows and grows, and resentment builds.
The difficulty is achieving a critical mass of infrastructure in the North - a couple of tram lines, a dozen bus routes is a waste of cash.
A dozen bus routes isn't a waste of cash if managed properly in a structured way.
Tram lines are temporary solutions, you need dedicated routes for the congested central bits at which point you may as well start looking at proper metros because once you are building tunnels you may as well do it properly.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
It is true, and I am claiming it as are many others.
Sure, but you're not accountable. They're spending a lot on making the Elizabeth line run well, and still they're not entirely succeeding. The project itself has clearly worked wonderfully - I'm not so sure about it's management.
No private companies are clamouring to build Crossrail2 are they?
No private company built CR1 or any other metro line anywhere in the world recently...
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
It's incredibly rare I agree with @Casino_Royale these days but he can be justifiably proud of Crossrail for all the delays and overruns based on some wholly unrealistic time and cost projections.
I use it a lot during the day and on the whole it's an excellent, comfortable and above all fast service for those seeking to go from east to west across the capital. The spur down through Canary Wharf to Woolwich and Abbey Road is one I use frequently and it's very good.
I underatand it is really busy in the peak periods but so are the tubes which are back to if not quite emulating pre-Covid numbers especially midweek (still quieter Mondays and Fridays).
Getting to Paddington, Slough and Heathrow is now much easier for east Londoners - it's a much quicker journey to Windsor via Slough and for Heathrow via Whitechapel it's far in advance of the old two tubes via Barons Court.
I can only hope if and when Crossrail 2 linking north and south comes to fruition (2030s?) it will achieve similar benefits.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
It is true, and I am claiming it as are many others.
Sure, but you're not accountable. They're spending a lot on making the Elizabeth line run well, and still they're not entirely succeeding. The project itself has clearly worked wonderfully - I'm not so sure about it's management.
No private companies are clamouring to build Crossrail2 are they?
Private companies are not going to take the development and political risk, and nor are they in any position to do so.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
See my point earlier that the complete and utter success of the Elizabeth line isn't being mentioned to avoid Crossrail 2 / 3 discussions.
Both of which should be in progress...
Heck if you rolled the Euston underground changes into CR2 (as was the original plan) Euston would start to look affordable...
It's politics (and the high cost of public debt too, tbh) holding Crossrail 2 back.
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
On a spreadsheet, investment in London always looks brilliant because you get these insane returns. But over time, that just means the gap between the SE and the rest of the UK grows and grows, and resentment builds.
The difficulty is achieving a critical mass of infrastructure in the North - a couple of tram lines, a dozen bus routes is a waste of cash.
A dozen bus routes isn't a waste of cash if managed properly in a structured way.
Tram lines are temporary solutions, you need dedicated routes for the congested central bits at which point you may as well start looking at proper metros because once you are building tunnels you may as well do it properly.
For bus routes, I think you do need a comprehensive network with regular buses (max 15 minute wait at rush hour), otherwise you don't get that cultural shift that allows the network to become profitable. At the moment we subsidise a rubbish service in too many places.
And on trams, I think there is a bit of chicken and egg here. The reason that our cities are so congested is because they don't have tram networks, so once you have them in they can run on the roads and enjoy prioritised signals, as they do in the rest of Europe.
It's incredibly rare I agree with @Casino_Royale these days but he can be justifiably proud of Crossrail for all the delays and overruns based on some wholly unrealistic time and cost projections.
I use it a lot during the day and on the whole it's an excellent, comfortable and above all fast service for those seeking to go from east to west across the capital. The spur down through Canary Wharf to Woolwich and Abbey Road is one I use frequently and it's very good.
I underatand it is really busy in the peak periods but so are the tubes which are back to if not quite emulating pre-Covid numbers especially midweek (still quieter Mondays and Fridays).
Getting to Paddington, Slough and Heathrow is now much easier for east Londoners - it's a much quicker journey to Windsor via Slough and for Heathrow via Whitechapel it's far in advance of the old two tubes via Barons Court.
I can only hope if and when Crossrail 2 linking north and south comes to fruition (2030s?) it will achieve similar benefits.
Londoners complaining about Crossrail being "too busy" always make me smile. The rest of the country is desperate for something like that!
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
The most extreme example of this is Edinburgh trams.
Underrated question. If they think there’s a genuine chance of Trump winning - which there certainly is - then this would be among the most consequential of all his policies in terms of the impact on the majority of Americans.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
I'm not sure that's entirely true - if it were the case then it's surprising that nobody is claiming it.
It is true, and I am claiming it as are many others.
Sure, but you're not accountable. They're spending a lot on making the Elizabeth line run well, and still they're not entirely succeeding. The project itself has clearly worked wonderfully - I'm not so sure about it's management.
No private companies are clamouring to build Crossrail2 are they?
Private companies are not going to take the development and political risk, and nor are they in any position to do so.
Mr Musk seems to have even bolder plans. I understand what you're saying, and I agree. I'd be amazed though if the Crossrail project could be seen as an accounting win. (And I hate every last toad that has prevented it from being so)
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
One of the biggest delays on the Elizabeth line (outside of Bond Street not being finished) was the need to interface across multiple different signalling systems which had never been done before.
That isn't going to be an issue for CR2 because that work has already been done..
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Few individual infrastructure projects, even large ones, have an "impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives" - at least directly.
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Because Brexit worked out so well and is incredibly popular due to Brexiteers' famous command of the facts and truth. Oh...perhaps not then.
I know which side I'd rather be on, alongside the facts - and in neither case is it your reactionary ill-informed one.
I'm looking forward to seeing @Luckyguy1983 back of a fag packet plans on how to revive an economy - I suspect it will be the best laugh we've had since Truss...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Is it the public nature of infrastructure investment that you dislike? Once upon a time, heavy industry and massive private firms would have taken the lead on stuff like this.
The fragmentation of private business means that only the government has the heft to take on the risk and borrowing required, only the government has the incentive to do so.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
Lucky guy is something of an outlier on economics. Leave it at that.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
The Harris campaign has sufficient resources to make a serious play for the Senate seats in Florida and Texas. If they’re serious about governing, they should probably do so.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
Lucky guy is something of an outlier on economics. Leave it at that.
As I said in my subsequent post - I could do with a laugh...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
"Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch has defended MPs taking freebie tickets to events, saying it allows them to spend time with their families.
The Conservatives have accused Labour of being "a government of self-service" and "living the high life" since details emerged of donations to senior figures in the party - including tickets for Sir Keir Starmer to watch football matches and see Taylor Swift in concert.
But while Ms Badenoch accused the new government of "hypocrisy" for taking donations, she also stood by her own register of interests that shows she had taken tickets and hospitality for a rugby game, the Jingle Bell Ball concert, and Ed Sheeran."
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Few individual infrastructure projects, even large ones, have an "impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives" - at least directly.
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
You can make the same argument about fiber optic cables: all the companies that laid them lost all their money. But the economy benefited massively from large amounts of dark fiber that could be lit up at negligible marginal cost.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Few individual infrastructure projects, even large ones, have an "impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives" - at least directly.
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
You can make the same argument about fiber optic cables: all the companies that laid them lost all their money. But the economy benefited massively from large amounts of dark fiber that could be lit up at negligible marginal cost.
Isn't that like Golf courses where it's something like the third owner who gets all the profit.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Few individual infrastructure projects, even large ones, have an "impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives" - at least directly.
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
You can make the same argument about fiber optic cables: all the companies that laid them lost all their money. But the economy benefited massively from large amounts of dark fiber that could be lit up at negligible marginal cost.
Isn't that like Golf courses where it's something like the third owner who gets all the profit.
The loathsome Robinson sort of threatens to sue CNN for reporting about his outrageous comments .
It’s the suggest you’re going after them to try and dupe the gullible into thinking you might have a case . Of course Robinson isn’t suing them just yet ! he says the NC public deserve his total attention on winning to save them from the alleged Dem dystopian nightmare and then after that he might get round to it !
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
Lucky guy is something of an outlier on economics. Leave it at that.
As I said in my subsequent post - I could do with a laugh...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Few individual infrastructure projects, even large ones, have an "impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives" - at least directly.
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
Not all infrastructure investment is the same.
They vary in usefulness, cost, longevity and I'm sure much more besides.
And those costs include opportunity costs - spending on A might mean there's no money for X, Y and Z.
Full fibre broadband, for example, has been an very worthwhile infrastructure investment - £33bn (with only £5bn from the government) and mostly complete already:
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the exact type of project that Italy / Spain or France are continually building and expending...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
Lucky guy is something of an outlier on economics. Leave it at that.
As I said in my subsequent post - I could do with a laugh...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Because Brexit worked out so well and is incredibly popular due to Brexiteers' famous command of the facts and truth. Oh...perhaps not then.
I know which side I'd rather be on, alongside the facts - and in neither case is it your reactionary ill-informed one.
I'm looking forward to seeing @Luckyguy1983 back of a fag packet plans on how to revive an economy - I suspect it will be the best laugh we've had since Truss...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
In a hypothetical match-up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Harris and Trump are now tied in Arizona (47% each), Nevada (45% each), Pennsylvania (47% each), and Wisconsin (47% each). Harris leads Trump by one point in Michigan (46% to 45%) and by six points in Minnesota (50% to 44%), while Trump leads Harris in Florida by five points (50% to 45%), in Georgia by two points (48% to 46%), and in North Carolina by one point (48% to 47%).
Since our last swing state voting intention poll, Harris has lost her narrow leads in both Wisconsin and North Carolina, while Trump has lost his advantages in Arizona and Nevada.
In every state polled except Florida (Trump +5%) and Minnesota (Harris +6%), the candidates are either tied or the lead for Trump or Harris is within the margin of error.
It is a sad reality; the strong growth in the French economy seen in August evaporated by September. The Flash Composite HCOB PMI has dropped well below the critical 50 mark, now standing at 47.4. This confirms the suspicion that the service sector surge in August was an Olympics-related anomaly, which has now dissipated. The situation in manufacturing remains difficult, much like in the previous month. Our HCOB Nowcast predicts near stagnation in the French economy for the third quarter, compared to the previous one. With this, France joins the group of Eurozone economies struggling with significant growth challenges
The downturn in the manufacturing sector has deepened again, evaporating any hope for an early recovery. Output plunged at the fastest rate in a year, with new orders collapsing. In a sign of resignation, companies have shed staff at a rate not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This comes as several major automotive suppliers have announced significant job reductions. These troubling figures are likely to intensify the ongoing debate in Germany about the risk of deindustrialization and what the government should do about it.
“Like” isn’t the right reaction to that. Germany looks to be heading for a serious recession. The pressure on the EU to slow down the electric car mandates is going to be immense.
Who’d have thought that France’s August anomoly might have been Olympics-related? Large international sporting or cultural events almost always have a positive impact on the host nations.
How is that going to help, except perhaps in the very short term ?
Because governments are trying to force a change by regulation for which the technology isn’t yet ready, it’s killing the European car industry and threatens to hand a large chunk of it to China.
European car production was up 11% in 2023.
The EV momentum is unstoppable now and none of the OEMs wanted to be last manufacturer stranded with an ICE dominated product line. It's being driven by Chinese consumers as much as regulation. EV/PHEV sales are over 50% of the Chinese market and it's rising fast. They don't have the reactionary and emotional attachment to ICE vehicles that the US and Europe do. Any manufacturer that pulls back from EVs is kissing the Chinese market goodbye.
Outside of the true premium market - I don't think any none Chinese manufacturer has a chance in China anymore..
The other thing is that the point where EV is cheaper to own and run is somewhere between already here (see China) and a couple of years off.
In many countries, the cheaper vehicle that cuts down oil imports, will be absolutely unstoppable.
The European faff about EVs is like the American faff about high speed rail or contactless credit cards. Treating it as a headscratcher of a hypothetical idea that might never catch on, and ignoring the fact the rest of the world already has it.
I used to carshare with a Mechanical Engineering Prof. Ended the share with the pandemic and other reasons. He was very strongly of the opinion that EV would never work, never take off. His main beef was the lack of range and need to charge for extended periods.
And all the while the mechanical engineers in the automotive industry have been solving those challenges. Makes me want to share with him again to see what he is thinking now.
Leon is a colossal arse at times, but he is right on one thing - people often struggle to see the change around the corner - the normalcy bias. I worry if I am doing the same re the future of University education in the face of AI.
That's a question of what does a university actually sell - because as I said before the value is in the stamp of authenticity attached to the name of the university as much as anything else
We have all sorts of opportunities today for people to access high quality resources and learn by themselves and, by and large, they don’t. There is value in being in a learning environment as part of a learning community, with human teachers.
Bollocks we would learn by ourselves indeed many do, the thing holding many back from studying by ourselves to get a better job is the banhammers who hoarde certification unless you fall for the uni scam. No piece of paper makes that learning mostly worthless. Go for a job tell someone you studied math's to degree level by yourself....see how much credence they give it
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
Compared with most serviced flats the service charges really aren't that bad...
"Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch has defended MPs taking freebie tickets to events, saying it allows them to spend time with their families.
The Conservatives have accused Labour of being "a government of self-service" and "living the high life" since details emerged of donations to senior figures in the party - including tickets for Sir Keir Starmer to watch football matches and see Taylor Swift in concert.
But while Ms Badenoch accused the new government of "hypocrisy" for taking donations, she also stood by her own register of interests that shows she had taken tickets and hospitality for a rugby game, the Jingle Bell Ball concert, and Ed Sheeran."
Fair play to her. Perhaps we'll hear less of this trivial nonsense now from the PB Tories.
(Interesting aside, she attended that ball with Sir Keir and Dr Rosena. Presumably they get on okay in private)
What? "It allows them to spend time with their families"? At those all too common venues where you are turned away at the door if the bouncers suspect you are paying with your own money? I hate it when that happens.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Is it the public nature of infrastructure investment that you dislike? Once upon a time, heavy industry and massive private firms would have taken the lead on stuff like this.
The fragmentation of private business means that only the government has the heft to take on the risk and borrowing required, only the government has the incentive to do so.
Not really. I do really just think it's putting the cart before the horse. Look at the Humber Bridge. All very nice. Utterly failed to revive the area economically because it linked two places that people didn't particularly want to go. On a smaller level, how many councils fund lovely new shopping streets with public art etc., but all the shops are shut? Revive the shops, and they will fund the nice new paving slabs.
I am not against Government-funded infrastructure if it's needed and the project is such that it can't be easily achieved by the private sector - but it must be because the economy is kicking into gear and demanding it, not because it's hoping to create that demand, because it can't.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
HS2 isn't a niche project it's as I said in a previous post essential to meet demand for rail transport in 2030 (both passenger and the rather invisible freight demand).
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
What you SHOULD do, is turn your Hampstead manse into the PB Home for Misfortunate Punters and Underappeciated Psephologists?
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
Yes, you wouldn't want to arrive at the Groucho pissed.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
I'd have put the Humber Bridge in the white elephant category. It was meant to link to an East Coast Motorway but that was canned centuries ago and elegant though it is I don't think it justifies the cost. Does anyone in Hull really want to go to Immingham or vice versa?
I suppose when the M62 bridge at Goole falls into the river it will allow for a diversion.
The least they could do now is to remove the toll.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I used to live in one of the tiny cottages next to (and owned by) The Flask on South Grove.
Lovely place but, well, tiny. My enduring memory was a slightly shamefaced return to the Whittington Hospital Emergency Department. 24 hours before I'd been in to have a cast fitted after I'd split my tibia flying a kite a little overenthusiastically on Barmouth beach the previous week.
Having got frustrated with the crutches I had taken to hopping around the cottage, but the doorways were so low I hopped into one and cracked my head open. I think the very same doctor glued my head back together as had put my cast on.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
I'd have put the Humber Bridge in the white elephant category. It was meant to link to an East Coast Motorway but that was canned centuries ago and elegant though it is I don't think it justifies the cost. Does anyone in Hull really want to go to Immingham or vice versa?
I suppose when the M62 bridge at Goole falls into the river it will allow for a diversion.
The least they could do now is to remove the toll.
They have to cover (some of) the interest costs somehow...
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
I'd have put the Humber Bridge in the white elephant category. It was meant to link to an East Coast Motorway but that was canned centuries ago and elegant though it is I don't think it justifies the cost. Does anyone in Hull really want to go to Immingham or vice versa?
I suppose when the M62 bridge at Goole falls into the river it will allow for a diversion.
The least they could do now is to remove the toll.
I wouldn't, actually. 33,000 cars use it a day, and 250 million vehicles have used it since it opened. A lot of that traffic would have had to go around via Goole, a massively long journey, and the rest of the traffic would not have existed.
If we didn't have it, we'd be wanting to build it.
David Frum @davidfrum · 4h Can we delete the phrase, "The race is close in the battleground states"? If the race were not close, it would not be a battleground state.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I used to live in one of the tiny cottages next to (and owned by) The Flask on South Grove.
Lovely place but, well, tiny. My enduring memory was a slightly shamefaced return to the Whittington Hospital Emergency Department. 24 hours before I'd been in to have a cast fitted after I'd split my tibia flying a kite a little overenthusiastically on Barmouth beach the previous week.
Having got frustrated with the crutches I had taken to hopping around the cottage, but the doorways were so low I hopped into one and cracked my head open. I think the very same doctor glued my head back together as had put my cast on.
Lovely pub, though.
My friend lives with his partner on the Holly Lodge Estate, do you know it?
It's REALLY odd. A sort of massive 1920s gated community of Tudorbethan mansion blocks designed for "distressed gentlewomen" (they let men in now, as well, if their partners abide there)
They've got a beautiful flat and they pay peppercorn rent, trouble is if they ever move they lose it, and you can't buy them or sell them
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
Yes, you wouldn't want to arrive at the Groucho pissed.
Droll
Tho, if they ever let you join, you might find yourself doing exactly that, quite a lot: as the Grouch becomes the natural finishing point of a bar-crawl around Soho
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
I had a mate who had a top floor penthouse in the Barbican. Superb views of the city and st pauls cathedral. Eventually he rented it out and moved to Mayfair.
"These clothes are wrong at a time when the growth agenda is going on. People have been let down by both sides and I think everyone should get round the negotiating table."
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
HS2 isn't a niche project it's as I said in a previous post essential to meet demand for rail transport in 2030 (both passenger and the rather invisible freight demand).
Is it essential infrastructure or a money making project for lawyers and consultants ?
If its the first then don't run it as if its the second.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Comments
The investment politically must be seen to go into the North first and, tbh, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Business cases are based on costs vs benefits. Benefits are calculated, largely, on passenger numbers. And passenger numbers have wildly exceeded expectations.
No doubt TfL have produced an assessment.
The difficulty is achieving a critical mass of infrastructure in the North - a couple of tram lines, a dozen bus routes is a waste of cash.
I'm starting to think that the best thing possible thing in this budget would be:-
replace council tax with a 0.5% house value tax that went to central government
x% of income tax given to local authorities with the ability for them to raise an additional y% for local transport or similar projects...
No private companies are clamouring to build Crossrail2 are they?
This time round he has an entire administration in waiting jonesing for it, and a Supreme Court which will very likely back him up.
Senate Polling Leads:
Siena/NYT (Sept 21):
Arizona: D +6
Mason-Dixon (Sept 18):
Minnesota: D +11
SurveyUSA (Sept 18):
New Mexico: D +13
MassInc (Sept 18):
Wisconsin: D +8
Massachusetts: D +21
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1838249660223304051
Tram lines are temporary solutions, you need dedicated routes for the congested central bits at which point you may as well start looking at proper metros because once you are building tunnels you may as well do it properly.
It is 90 miles away and the only quicker route is by car at approx 2 hours
Transport north- south through Wales is almost at stage coach level
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
1) the UK,
2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
It's incredibly rare I agree with @Casino_Royale these days but he can be justifiably proud of Crossrail for all the delays and overruns based on some wholly unrealistic time and cost projections.
I use it a lot during the day and on the whole it's an excellent, comfortable and above all fast service for those seeking to go from east to west across the capital. The spur down through Canary Wharf to Woolwich and Abbey Road is one I use frequently and it's very good.
I underatand it is really busy in the peak periods but so are the tubes which are back to if not quite emulating pre-Covid numbers especially midweek (still quieter Mondays and Fridays).
Getting to Paddington, Slough and Heathrow is now much easier for east Londoners - it's a much quicker journey to Windsor via Slough and for Heathrow via Whitechapel it's far in advance of the old two tubes via Barons Court.
I can only hope if and when Crossrail 2 linking north and south comes to fruition (2030s?) it will achieve similar benefits.
And on trams, I think there is a bit of chicken and egg here. The reason that our cities are so congested is because they don't have tram networks, so once you have them in they can run on the roads and enjoy prioritised signals, as they do in the rest of Europe.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
by Woodie Gurthrie
performed by The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flkuZJ1did8
I know which side I'd rather be on, alongside the facts - and in neither case is it your reactionary ill-informed one.
That isn't going to be an issue for CR2 because that work has already been done..
I don't use the M62. I've probably been on it a dozen times or so in my life. Imagine how much money could have been saved if it had not been built - because it doesn't benefit *me*.
Except it may well do. The food I get at the supermarket may have come along the M62, or a family friend using it to visit me. Or it might make a journey I need to make next year more achievable.
"I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies."
The industrial revolution was all about infrastructure - in one part, the canals, then railways. Our economy was massively more powerful afterwards than it was before,
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
The fragmentation of private business means that only the government has the heft to take on the risk and borrowing required, only the government has the incentive to do so.
Leave it at that.
Cruz (R): 48%
Allred (D): 45%
Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation / Sept 18, 2024 / n=1200
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1838247097285358034
The Harris campaign has sufficient resources to make a serious play for the Senate seats in Florida and Texas. If they’re serious about governing, they should probably do so.
(Interesting aside, she attended that ball with Sir Keir and Dr Rosena. Presumably they get on okay in private)
It's a Fullers...
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Not that I play golf, of course.
It’s the suggest you’re going after them to try and dupe the gullible into thinking you might have a case . Of course Robinson isn’t suing them just yet ! he says the NC public deserve his total attention on winning to save them from the alleged Dem dystopian nightmare and then after that he might get round to it !
https://x.com/trussliz/status/1838101872969687143
They vary in usefulness, cost, longevity and I'm sure much more besides.
And those costs include opportunity costs - spending on A might mean there's no money for X, Y and Z.
Full fibre broadband, for example, has been an very worthwhile infrastructure investment - £33bn (with only £5bn from the government) and mostly complete already:
https://builduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Full-Fibre-Broadband-Factsheet.pdf
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK.
2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground.
3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
I simply cannot understand why anyone would vote for a man that is currently selling snake oil - not just political snake oil, but the real thing.
"After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change."
https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1838276064457416719
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
This tweet from 2020 demonstrates why it is so hard to predict the 2024 US election. Trump vote has been very efficient in the last two elections.
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-us-swing-states-voting-intention-16-19-september-2024/
In a hypothetical match-up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Harris and Trump are now tied in Arizona (47% each), Nevada (45% each), Pennsylvania (47% each), and Wisconsin (47% each). Harris leads Trump by one point in Michigan (46% to 45%) and by six points in Minnesota (50% to 44%), while Trump leads Harris in Florida by five points (50% to 45%), in Georgia by two points (48% to 46%), and in North Carolina by one point (48% to 47%).
Since our last swing state voting intention poll, Harris has lost her narrow leads in both Wisconsin and North Carolina, while Trump has lost his advantages in Arizona and Nevada.
In every state polled except Florida (Trump +5%) and Minnesota (Harris +6%), the candidates are either tied or the lead for Trump or Harris is within the margin of error.
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution.
3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
Get the delux version with genunine imitation leather . . . and words of DJT in red . . .
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
I am not against Government-funded infrastructure if it's needed and the project is such that it can't be easily achieved by the private sector - but it must be because the economy is kicking into gear and demanding it, not because it's hoping to create that demand, because it can't.
Give something back!
I suppose when the M62 bridge at Goole falls into the river it will allow for a diversion.
The least they could do now is to remove the toll.
At 12pm I had already missed the only train of the day. Walked to Tesco Extra and got the bus.
Lovely place but, well, tiny. My enduring memory was a slightly shamefaced return to the Whittington Hospital Emergency Department. 24 hours before I'd been in to have a cast fitted after I'd split my tibia flying a kite a little overenthusiastically on Barmouth beach the previous week.
Having got frustrated with the crutches I had taken to hopping around the cottage, but the doorways were so low I hopped into one and cracked my head open. I think the very same doctor glued my head back together as had put my cast on.
Lovely pub, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_United_Kingdom#1997–present_day
Over thirty years since a motorway was built in Britain so why don't we have the infrastructure advocates demanding more roads and new motorways ?
The A1 has been replaced by a three lane motorway the A1(M) between Leeds and Scotch Corner / J56 where the A1M used to begin...
If we didn't have it, we'd be wanting to build it.
@davidfrum
·
4h
Can we delete the phrase, "The race is close in the battleground states"? If the race were not close, it would not be a battleground state.
https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1838218456254046639
All my Xs live in Texas?
(Sorry.)
It's REALLY odd. A sort of massive 1920s gated community of Tudorbethan mansion blocks designed for "distressed gentlewomen" (they let men in now, as well, if their partners abide there)
They've got a beautiful flat and they pay peppercorn rent, trouble is if they ever move they lose it, and you can't buy them or sell them
That was a much needed improvement.
Shame the A1 in South Yorkshire is now completely screwed by the Wentbridge repairs (ongoing for, what, 2 years now?)
@JohnRentoul
·
7m
Ed Miliband tries the “it won’t decide the next election” defence of freebies
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1838285774543798351
Ditto Northern Maine.
Tho, if they ever let you join, you might find yourself doing exactly that, quite a lot: as the Grouch becomes the natural finishing point of a bar-crawl around Soho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z7o3sRxA5g
If its the first then don't run it as if its the second.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).