Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You need infrastructure to get people to where you want them to work otherwise the company will just go to London where there are enough qualified people in a sane commuting area to work there.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You mean, what we've had since the 1980s, when London got turbocharged and the north went backwards?
Not at all - London loves an overregulated economy with expensive power and high barriers to entry; it serves big corporations very well. I am talking about recreating the conditions (bar slavery) that made the provinces wealthy in the first place.
Not quite you are badly quoting what happened on the Industrial Revolution with little understanding of how things have changed.
Nowadays for companies to be successful they need a critical mass of qualified workers within the appropriate commuting area hence why London does so well because if I need another data analyst there are a lot of London and so always a few looking for a new job.
Up north there may be 100 rather than 5000 so recruitment is far harder
Firstly, no you don't - remote working appears to have passed you by, speaking of having little understanding about the way things have changed...
Secondly, you are talking about professional services companies. Clearly I am not. I am talking about Northampton shoemakers, Birmingham glass, Welsh clothiers. None of which need 'a lot' of data analysts in the vicinity - yes data analysis is still important, but companies of the sort I describe don't need big departments of them. They need people who are pretty good with their hands and want to make stuff.
This is utterly delusional, but depressing that that anyone can actually believe this stuff.
I'd love a pair of bespoke shoes but the market is mostly local (your feet are measured to make a last) and limited by the price. You are literally paying for a person to hand make them slowly, their productivity won't have changed significantly in 100 years. It would probably be more profitable to dig coal by hand in Wales than attempt to compete in textiles in any meaningful scale
Its fetishising things made by toil and sweat and skill - always by someone with their arse welded to an office chair and would be horrified if one of their kids wanted to be a hairdresser or mechanic.
What's depressing is that you and like-minded idiots liking this post dismiss the idea of high quality manufacturing playing a role in our economy when it plays a significant role in the economies of Germany, France, Italy, and the other countries that I've mentioned. Probably because you like the fact that it means we're 'releasing less carbon', despite every possibility that more net carbon will be released worldwide as a result.
Wales has a good track record in garment manufacture afaicr, it made all M&S clothes until the 90s, along with Laura Ashley. The reasons against it doing so again that you seem to think are so very insurmountable are simply the costs we as a state have chosen to heap on businesses that make things. They are choices. So your opposition to what I'm putting forward is entirely circular and based on nothing.
You seem to have this idea that manufacturing still looks like it did in the 1990s and it simply doesn’t.
Then a factory was a lot of workers and a few machines, now it’s 99% machines with far fewer very highly skilled people keeping the machines in order.
And factories then have a habit of moving to whichever country offers the best tax breaks - which is why you see factories close down and move to Eastern Europe or similar because that country is currently providing incentives for the next x years. When those x years are up the company looks at where to go next.
Now there are exceptions to that Nissan being the obvious one but even then every x years it goes to the government and asks for more money to remain open
Btw Nissan pays well but your £40,000 role to keep the machines going is a very skilled role with years of experience required to know the ins and outs of all the machines you need to maintain
It depends on the sector. But factory tech can change rapidly. In the 1990s, a boss of mine went to a TV manufacturing plant in Turkey (Vestel, I think). They were a company no-one in the UK have every heard of, but made TVs for a lot of the 'cheap' brands. He described standing at one end of the long building and not being able to see the far end for a fug of cigarette smoke, dust and crud in the air. An atmosphere not particularly conducive to making electronic devices.
He went back a couple of years later after a refit, and it was totally different. Fewer people, less noise and chaotic bustle, and the air was clear. They also made *a lot* more TVs.
ALSO allowing people to attack politicians (esp ones we don't like) and merely giving them a slapped wrist (suspended sentence) just ensures that the quality of MPs will further decline. Like, who the fuck will want to do this job if society won't even protect their physical safety?
That girl should have got a deterrent sentence like the prison sentence the man got for threatening Miliband, verbally, with murder
Do that a few times and people will STOP attacking MPs - and then maybe bright, talented but nervous people will be more likely to try politics as a career
If it had been acid, she would have got a very different sentence. But it wasn’t. So she didn’t.
No. That kind of thinking creates the circumstances for it to be acid next time.
Anyone attacking any politician needs to receive a nasty sentence pour encourager les autres.
When I was at school, another boy once tipped a bowl of ice cream over my head. The police were not involved. Should they have been?
Or does the victim being a politician make all the difference? That sounds like two tiers to me.
For family reasons, I went to schools abroad with a British basis and a US basis. Bullying was rife at the former and unknown at the latter. I've sometimes wondered why - the mix of families involved was similar (diplomats, business people, etc.), so there was apparently something in the British culture which encouraged bullying.
I'd favour fairly mild penalties for the ice cream assault, not necessarily involving the overstretched police but not excused as being only kids. Suspension for a week, something like that. If it happened to a politician, I'd expect the assailant to lose their job or at least get a last-chance warning. A suspended prison sentence sounds about right.
There has been a long history of people throwing harmless things at politicians in this country. Normally eggs. I don't approve of it, but I also think that saying "ooooo, it could have been acid" is absurd. It wasn't. It was a milkshake. An egg does not equate to a Molotov cocktail, and a milkshake does not equate to acid. Goodness me, Faragists are now becoming as snowflakey as lefties!
We also have a horrible recent history of MPs being murdered and attacked - Jo Cox and David Amess, and others
I am not a fan of British politicians, as a class, but they are way more exposed than the rest of us: they meet many more people in their daily lives, so they take much more risk. And they are far more likely to be a juicy target for a jihadist or a Nazi or a nutter than you or I
For that reason they DO deserve greater protection than Joe Newent. I would have short prison sentences for anyone that physically attacks them, even just a milkshake, and I would apply that to Jeremy Corbyn just as much as Nigel Farage
I would apply that to neither. Farage should sue for damages to his clothes, and perhaps hurt to his feelings (the poor little weakling) which would be appropriate. He was not physically injured. It was a protest at his extremist views and is legitimate protest IMO. An egg might have been more traditional and better.
If it had been acid, she would have got a very different sentence. But it wasn’t. So she didn’t.
No. That kind of thinking creates the circumstances for it to be acid next time.
Anyone attacking any politician needs to receive a nasty sentence pour encourager les autres.
When I was at school, another boy once tipped a bowl of ice cream over my head. The police were not involved. Should they have been?
Or does the victim being a politician make all the difference? That sounds like two tiers to me.
For family reasons, I went to schools abroad with a British basis and a US basis. Bullying was rife at the former and unknown at the latter. I've sometimes wondered why - the mix of families involved was similar (diplomats, business people, etc.), so there was apparently something in the British culture which encouraged bullying.
I'd favour fairly mild penalties for the ice cream assault, not necessarily involving the overstretched police but not excused as being only kids. Suspension for a week, something like that. If it happened to a politician, I'd expect the assailant to lose their job or at least get a last-chance warning. A suspended prison sentence sounds about right.
There has been a long history of people throwing harmless things at politicians in this country. Normally eggs. I don't approve of it, but I also think that saying "ooooo, it could have been acid" is absurd. It wasn't. It was a milkshake. An egg does not equate to a Molotov cocktail, and a milkshake does not equate to acid. Goodness me, Faragists are now becoming as snowflakey as lefties!
We also have a horrible recent history of MPs being murdered and attacked - Jo Cox and David Amess, and others
I am not a fan of British politicians, as a class, but they are way more exposed than the rest of us: they meet many more people in their daily lives, so they take much more risk. And they are far more likely to be a juicy target for a jihadist or a Nazi or a nutter than you or I
For that reason they DO deserve greater protection than Joe Newent. I would have short prison sentences for anyone that physically attacks them, even just a milkshake, and I would apply that to Jeremy Corbyn just as much as Nigel Farage
I would apply that to neither. Farage should sue for damages to his clothes, and perhaps hurt to his feelings (the poor little weakling) which would be appropriate. He was not physically injured. It was a protest at his extremist views and is legitimate protest IMO. An egg might have been more traditional and better.
Then don't be surprised if the quality of MPs gets even worse, and don't moan about the declining calibre of politicians
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You need infrastructure to get people to where you want them to work otherwise the company will just go to London where there are enough qualified people in a sane commuting area to work there.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You mean, what we've had since the 1980s, when London got turbocharged and the north went backwards?
Not at all - London loves an overregulated economy with expensive power and high barriers to entry; it serves big corporations very well. I am talking about recreating the conditions (bar slavery) that made the provinces wealthy in the first place.
Not quite you are badly quoting what happened on the Industrial Revolution with little understanding of how things have changed.
Nowadays for companies to be successful they need a critical mass of qualified workers within the appropriate commuting area hence why London does so well because if I need another data analyst there are a lot of London and so always a few looking for a new job.
Up north there may be 100 rather than 5000 so recruitment is far harder
Firstly, no you don't - remote working appears to have passed you by, speaking of having little understanding about the way things have changed...
Secondly, you are talking about professional services companies. Clearly I am not. I am talking about Northampton shoemakers, Birmingham glass, Welsh clothiers. None of which need 'a lot' of data analysts in the vicinity - yes data analysis is still important, but companies of the sort I describe don't need big departments of them. They need people who are pretty good with their hands and want to make stuff.
This is utterly delusional, but depressing that that anyone can actually believe this stuff.
I'd love a pair of bespoke shoes but the market is mostly local (your feet are measured to make a last) and limited by the price. You are literally paying for a person to hand make them slowly, their productivity won't have changed significantly in 100 years. It would probably be more profitable to dig coal by hand in Wales than attempt to compete in textiles in any meaningful scale
Its fetishising things made by toil and sweat and skill - always by someone with their arse welded to an office chair and would be horrified if one of their kids wanted to be a hairdresser or mechanic.
What's depressing is that you and like-minded idiots liking this post dismiss the idea of high quality manufacturing playing a role in our economy when it plays a significant role in the economies of Germany, France, Italy, and the other countries that I've mentioned. Probably because you like the fact that it means we're 'releasing less carbon', despite every possibility that more net carbon will be released worldwide as a result.
Wales has a good track record in garment manufacture afaicr, it made all M&S clothes until the 90s, along with Laura Ashley. The reasons against it doing so again that you seem to think are so very insurmountable are simply the costs we as a state have chosen to heap on businesses that make things. They are choices. So your opposition to what I'm putting forward is entirely circular and based on nothing.
This is pitiful. You are embarrassing yourself.
Mass textile manufacturing like the image you posted, is far from high quality manufacturing. The last time the UK had it, it survived on bringing cheap labour from the subcontinent to work in the industry in Lamcashire & Yorkshire mill towns, Leicester, Glasgow, East London etc
"Wales ..... it made all M&S clothes until the 90s"
I mean, where do you go with this utter rubbish. It's not even remotely close to being half true.
My opposition is based on comparative advantage as set out by Ricardo 200 years ago.
Instead we have halfwits still think about self sufficiency in industries that have long gone.
If it had been acid, she would have got a very different sentence. But it wasn’t. So she didn’t.
No. That kind of thinking creates the circumstances for it to be acid next time.
Anyone attacking any politician needs to receive a nasty sentence pour encourager les autres.
When I was at school, another boy once tipped a bowl of ice cream over my head. The police were not involved. Should they have been?
Or does the victim being a politician make all the difference? That sounds like two tiers to me.
For family reasons, I went to schools abroad with a British basis and a US basis. Bullying was rife at the former and unknown at the latter. I've sometimes wondered why - the mix of families involved was similar (diplomats, business people, etc.), so there was apparently something in the British culture which encouraged bullying.
I'd favour fairly mild penalties for the ice cream assault, not necessarily involving the overstretched police but not excused as being only kids. Suspension for a week, something like that. If it happened to a politician, I'd expect the assailant to lose their job or at least get a last-chance warning. A suspended prison sentence sounds about right.
There has been a long history of people throwing harmless things at politicians in this country. Normally eggs. I don't approve of it, but I also think that saying "ooooo, it could have been acid" is absurd. It wasn't. It was a milkshake. An egg does not equate to a Molotov cocktail, and a milkshake does not equate to acid. Goodness me, Faragists are now becoming as snowflakey as lefties!
We also have a horrible recent history of MPs being murdered and attacked - Jo Cox and David Amess, and others
I am not a fan of British politicians, as a class, but they are way more exposed than the rest of us: they meet many more people in their daily lives, so they take much more risk. And they are far more likely to be a juicy target for a jihadist or a Nazi or a nutter than you or I
For that reason they DO deserve greater protection than Joe Newent. I would have short prison sentences for anyone that physically attacks them, even just a milkshake, and I would apply that to Jeremy Corbyn just as much as Nigel Farage
I would apply that to neither. Farage should sue for damages to his clothes, and perhaps hurt to his feelings (the poor little weakling) which would be appropriate. He was not physically injured. It was a protest at his extremist views and is legitimate protest IMO. An egg might have been more traditional and better.
Then don't be surprised if the quality of MPs gets even worse, and don't moan about the declining calibre of politicians
If it had been acid, she would have got a very different sentence. But it wasn’t. So she didn’t.
No. That kind of thinking creates the circumstances for it to be acid next time.
Anyone attacking any politician needs to receive a nasty sentence pour encourager les autres.
When I was at school, another boy once tipped a bowl of ice cream over my head. The police were not involved. Should they have been?
Or does the victim being a politician make all the difference? That sounds like two tiers to me.
For family reasons, I went to schools abroad with a British basis and a US basis. Bullying was rife at the former and unknown at the latter. I've sometimes wondered why - the mix of families involved was similar (diplomats, business people, etc.), so there was apparently something in the British culture which encouraged bullying.
I'd favour fairly mild penalties for the ice cream assault, not necessarily involving the overstretched police but not excused as being only kids. Suspension for a week, something like that. If it happened to a politician, I'd expect the assailant to lose their job or at least get a last-chance warning. A suspended prison sentence sounds about right.
There has been a long history of people throwing harmless things at politicians in this country. Normally eggs. I don't approve of it, but I also think that saying "ooooo, it could have been acid" is absurd. It wasn't. It was a milkshake. An egg does not equate to a Molotov cocktail, and a milkshake does not equate to acid. Goodness me, Faragists are now becoming as snowflakey as lefties!
We also have a horrible recent history of MPs being murdered and attacked - Jo Cox and David Amess, and others
I am not a fan of British politicians, as a class, but they are way more exposed than the rest of us: they meet many more people in their daily lives, so they take much more risk. And they are far more likely to be a juicy target for a jihadist or a Nazi or a nutter than you or I
For that reason they DO deserve greater protection than Joe Newent. I would have short prison sentences for anyone that physically attacks them, even just a milkshake, and I would apply that to Jeremy Corbyn just as much as Nigel Farage
I would apply that to neither. Farage should sue for damages to his clothes, and perhaps hurt to his feelings (the poor little weakling) which would be appropriate. He was not physically injured. It was a protest at his extremist views and is legitimate protest IMO. An egg might have been more traditional and better.
Then don't be surprised if the quality of MPs gets even worse, and don't moan about the declining calibre of politicians
You can't get much worse than Nigel Fuhrer..
May I refer you to The Life and Times of Elizabeth Truss, MP
EXCLUSIVE Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
EXCLUSIVE Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
Agreed: even if Councils are being restructured, democracy should not be postponed.
It's also dumb: Labour is barely defending any seats this time around.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
Liberal Democrats?
Oh, wait. J Thorpe, C Smith...
You're right.
lol
But that's actually a good example, in its weird way
EXCLUSIVE Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
Agreed: even if Councils are being restructured, democracy should not be postponed.
It's also dumb: Labour is barely defending any seats this time around.
If you hold elections it may create a protest vote against the change and because of the timing it doesn’t actual give good governance.
Now if this had been six months earlier the new April 2025 election would be for the new council and continuation old one but the timing makes that impossible here so you may as well delay things
@SkyNews BREAKING: Lucy Letby's legal team has said the lead prosecution expert has "now changed his mind" on the cause of death of three babies, meaning all of her convictions should be reviewed.
EXCLUSIVE Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
Agreed: even if Councils are being restructured, democracy should not be postponed.
It's also dumb: Labour is barely defending any seats this time around.
If you hold elections it may create a protest vote against the change and because of the timing it doesn’t actual give good governance.
Now if this had been six months earlier the new April 2025 election would be for the new council and continuation old one but the timing makes that impossible here so you may as well delay things
Why wait until 2026? Can't the elections be held in September?
EXCLUSIVE Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
Fairly normal, though. The GLC elections that were due in 1985 didn't happen because there wasn't much point when the GLC was going to be abolished the following year. The same happened when bits were nibbled out of counties in 1998; those areas didn't get a county council election in 1997.
Which won't stop some people making a fuss, of course.
(Though the timeframe for all this looks very tight- proposals within a month, roughly half of which will be lost to Christmas. Maybe that's the point- don't give people time to quibble about the details, when anyone with half a brain could draw the map that reasonably meets the criteria in an afternoon.)
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
Not to forget paranoia, avarice, cruelty, ignorance, sloth, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. These things are part of human nature along with all the good stuff. But so what? What's important is we try to promote the latter at the expense of the former. This right wing national populism that's having a moment right now, the Trumps the Farages the AfDs the "make x great agains" of this world do the opposite. This is why I despise them all.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
Do you have any particular rocks in mind?
You need something like olivine, which naturally weathers by absorbing CO2. Plenty of that in Greenland, for example, where doing exactly what you advocate has been proposed. They could then sell carbon offsets to high emitters.
If it had been acid, she would have got a very different sentence. But it wasn’t. So she didn’t.
No. That kind of thinking creates the circumstances for it to be acid next time.
Anyone attacking any politician needs to receive a nasty sentence pour encourager les autres.
When I was at school, another boy once tipped a bowl of ice cream over my head. The police were not involved. Should they have been?
Or does the victim being a politician make all the difference? That sounds like two tiers to me.
For family reasons, I went to schools abroad with a British basis and a US basis. Bullying was rife at the former and unknown at the latter. I've sometimes wondered why - the mix of families involved was similar (diplomats, business people, etc.), so there was apparently something in the British culture which encouraged bullying.
I'd favour fairly mild penalties for the ice cream assault, not necessarily involving the overstretched police but not excused as being only kids. Suspension for a week, something like that. If it happened to a politician, I'd expect the assailant to lose their job or at least get a last-chance warning. A suspended prison sentence sounds about right.
That's interesting, from watching US movies you'd think that bullying was extremely widespread in US schools! I think that bullying is more common in some types of school than in others. Our children's comprehensive school seems to do a good job anyway, our kids don't report any problems.
I'm sure that's true, and it probably relates to the school culture as well as the families. If minor bullying is tolerated, it opens the door. I'd guess that all three schools that I went to had fairly prosperous parents, but the UK-based one (in Vienna) was very different. There was mild and occasional corporal punishment (this was the late 50s) - a slap on the bottom, that sort of thing - and habitual low-level bullying. I shrugged it off but mentioned to my parents an incident when there was an attempt to push a kid out of a (slowly) moving school bus. Much to my dismay, they took me out of the school the same evening - probably right in retrospect - and I never encountered any problem at all in 8 years at American-based schools (and corporal punishment was unthinkable).
I've no way of telling how generalisable these (dated) experiences are. But they left me with a toleration of America rare among my communist friends at the time.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
Do you have any particular rocks in mind?
You need something like olivine, which naturally weathers by absorbing CO2. Plenty of that in Greenland, for example, where doing exactly what you advocate has been proposed. They could then sell carbon offsets to high emitters.
I believe basalt was proposed.
[Not sure a superquarry on Mull or Skye will go down well]
I imagine the same folk complaining that "democracy is being denied" by postponing council elections would be complaining about the waste of money if elections were held for seats on councils that will be abolished 12 months later.
Incidentally, in our all-out elections in Bradford in 2026, the third placed winner in each ward will be up for reelection in 2027.
IIRC, there was a similar set up in Leeds a few years ago when there were boundary changes there.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
So, I last looked at this about 15 years ago when one of the carbon trading businesses did some research, and - IIRC - the basic principle is fairly simple and sound: so, silicate and carbonate minerals in finely ground rock naturally react with CO₂ and water in the atmosphere, forming bicarbonates and these eventually wash into the ocean.
The issues were two fold: firstly, scaling it up is difficult because you need to move a *lot* of rock dust around (and you also need a while industrial process around collecting and grinding rock, *and* said grinding was extremely energy intensive.); secondly, farmers tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, and offering to spread rock dust over their fields was met with scepticism. In particular, there were concerns that if five years later it was found to cause stomach cancer or something, then the people who'd spread rock dust on their fields were going to be fucked.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You need infrastructure to get people to where you want them to work otherwise the company will just go to London where there are enough qualified people in a sane commuting area to work there.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You mean, what we've had since the 1980s, when London got turbocharged and the north went backwards?
Not at all - London loves an overregulated economy with expensive power and high barriers to entry; it serves big corporations very well. I am talking about recreating the conditions (bar slavery) that made the provinces wealthy in the first place.
Not quite you are badly quoting what happened on the Industrial Revolution with little understanding of how things have changed.
Nowadays for companies to be successful they need a critical mass of qualified workers within the appropriate commuting area hence why London does so well because if I need another data analyst there are a lot of London and so always a few looking for a new job.
Up north there may be 100 rather than 5000 so recruitment is far harder
Firstly, no you don't - remote working appears to have passed you by, speaking of having little understanding about the way things have changed...
Secondly, you are talking about professional services companies. Clearly I am not. I am talking about Northampton shoemakers, Birmingham glass, Welsh clothiers. None of which need 'a lot' of data analysts in the vicinity - yes data analysis is still important, but companies of the sort I describe don't need big departments of them. They need people who are pretty good with their hands and want to make stuff.
This is utterly delusional, but depressing that that anyone can actually believe this stuff.
I'd love a pair of bespoke shoes but the market is mostly local (your feet are measured to make a last) and limited by the price. You are literally paying for a person to hand make them slowly, their productivity won't have changed significantly in 100 years. It would probably be more profitable to dig coal by hand in Wales than attempt to compete in textiles in any meaningful scale
Its fetishising things made by toil and sweat and skill - always by someone with their arse welded to an office chair and would be horrified if one of their kids wanted to be a hairdresser or mechanic.
What's depressing is that you and like-minded idiots liking this post dismiss the idea of high quality manufacturing playing a role in our economy when it plays a significant role in the economies of Germany, France, Italy, and the other countries that I've mentioned. Probably because you like the fact that it means we're 'releasing less carbon', despite every possibility that more net carbon will be released worldwide as a result.
Wales has a good track record in garment manufacture afaicr, it made all M&S clothes until the 90s, along with Laura Ashley. The reasons against it doing so again that you seem to think are so very insurmountable are simply the costs we as a state have chosen to heap on businesses that make things. They are choices. So your opposition to what I'm putting forward is entirely circular and based on nothing.
This is pitiful. You are embarrassing yourself.
Mass textile manufacturing like the image you posted, is far from high quality manufacturing. The last time the UK had it, it survived on bringing cheap labour from the subcontinent to work in the industry in Lamcashire & Yorkshire mill towns, Leicester, Glasgow, East London etc
"Wales ..... it made all M&S clothes until the 90s"
I mean, where do you go with this utter rubbish. It's not even remotely close to being half true.
My opposition is based on comparative advantage as set out by Ricardo 200 years ago.
Instead we have halfwits still think about self sufficiency in industries that have long gone.
OK dear.
How to answer this interesting stream of consciousness?
Nobody has suggested that we should be self-sufficient in garment manufacture. There would be little point - it would be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to wear.
I have made the relatively simple (though sadly not simple enough it would appear) argument that we should encourage more high value manufacturing in areas that have historically benefitted from such industries but are now prevented from doing so by the extraordinarily high costs associated with making anything. I don't really see how that is remotely contentious - I suspect even Keir Starmer would nod along, but sadly it seems to be beyond the wit or imagination of some PBers to conceive of such a situation.
That photo being from a low value mass-market garment factory doesn't serve your argument, it serves my argument. If a massive factory in China still needs to employ people sewing each garment, that amply confirms that you can't operate a garment factory on two cleaners and a robot, which was the suggestion I refuted by posting it.
The accuracy or otherwise of clothing being made in Wales, whilst interesting, is also not a pillar of my argument - the clothes were made exclusively in the UK, so the point stands. I could quite easily trash your arguments because you can't spell 'Lancashire' correctly, but I'd rather do so on the basis that your argument is shit.
Your knowledge of the sector is clearly virtually zero - there is still a lot of high quality textile and clothing manufacture in the UK - hanging on by a proverbial thread in the face of the ridiculous costs imposed by Government. Make these costs less, and business can thrive once again.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
So, I last looked at this about 15 years ago when one of the carbon trading businesses did some research, and - IIRC - the basic principle is fairly simple and sound: so, silicate and carbonate minerals in finely ground rock naturally react with CO₂ and water in the atmosphere, forming bicarbonates and these eventually wash into the ocean.
The issues were two fold: firstly, scaling it up is difficult because you need to move a *lot* of rock dust around (and you also need a while industrial process around collecting and grinding rock, *and* said grinding was extremely energy intensive.); secondly, farmers tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, and offering to spread rock dust over their fields was met with scepticism. In particular, there were concerns that if five years later it was found to cause stomach cancer or something, then the people who'd spread rock dust on their fields were going to be fucked.
Well, we're likely to be looking for a way to use huge amounts of very cheap but intermittent energy in the next few years...
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
Not to forget paranoia, avarice, cruelty, ignorance, sloth, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. These things are part of human nature along with all the good stuff. But so what? What's important is we try to promote the latter at the expense of the former. This right wing national populism that's having a moment right now, the Trumps the Farages the AfDs the "make x great agains" of this world do the opposite. This is why I despise them all.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You need infrastructure to get people to where you want them to work otherwise the company will just go to London where there are enough qualified people in a sane commuting area to work there.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
Probably just as well, because it's not a very good policy. Economic wealth will not return to the North becauase they have gleaming trams and no potholes. We need a wider economic revival based on low taxes, easy regulation, a flexible labour market and low energy costs, then build the infrastructure we need when things take off, not build the infrastructure first and hope a backward process takes place. The idea is more absurd the more one thinks about it.
You mean, what we've had since the 1980s, when London got turbocharged and the north went backwards?
Not at all - London loves an overregulated economy with expensive power and high barriers to entry; it serves big corporations very well. I am talking about recreating the conditions (bar slavery) that made the provinces wealthy in the first place.
Not quite you are badly quoting what happened on the Industrial Revolution with little understanding of how things have changed.
Nowadays for companies to be successful they need a critical mass of qualified workers within the appropriate commuting area hence why London does so well because if I need another data analyst there are a lot of London and so always a few looking for a new job.
Up north there may be 100 rather than 5000 so recruitment is far harder
Firstly, no you don't - remote working appears to have passed you by, speaking of having little understanding about the way things have changed...
Secondly, you are talking about professional services companies. Clearly I am not. I am talking about Northampton shoemakers, Birmingham glass, Welsh clothiers. None of which need 'a lot' of data analysts in the vicinity - yes data analysis is still important, but companies of the sort I describe don't need big departments of them. They need people who are pretty good with their hands and want to make stuff.
This is utterly delusional, but depressing that that anyone can actually believe this stuff.
I'd love a pair of bespoke shoes but the market is mostly local (your feet are measured to make a last) and limited by the price. You are literally paying for a person to hand make them slowly, their productivity won't have changed significantly in 100 years. It would probably be more profitable to dig coal by hand in Wales than attempt to compete in textiles in any meaningful scale
Its fetishising things made by toil and sweat and skill - always by someone with their arse welded to an office chair and would be horrified if one of their kids wanted to be a hairdresser or mechanic.
What's depressing is that you and like-minded idiots liking this post dismiss the idea of high quality manufacturing playing a role in our economy when it plays a significant role in the economies of Germany, France, Italy, and the other countries that I've mentioned. Probably because you like the fact that it means we're 'releasing less carbon', despite every possibility that more net carbon will be released worldwide as a result.
Wales has a good track record in garment manufacture afaicr, it made all M&S clothes until the 90s, along with Laura Ashley. The reasons against it doing so again that you seem to think are so very insurmountable are simply the costs we as a state have chosen to heap on businesses that make things. They are choices. So your opposition to what I'm putting forward is entirely circular and based on nothing.
This is pitiful. You are embarrassing yourself.
Mass textile manufacturing like the image you posted, is far from high quality manufacturing. The last time the UK had it, it survived on bringing cheap labour from the subcontinent to work in the industry in Lamcashire & Yorkshire mill towns, Leicester, Glasgow, East London etc
"Wales ..... it made all M&S clothes until the 90s"
I mean, where do you go with this utter rubbish. It's not even remotely close to being half true.
My opposition is based on comparative advantage as set out by Ricardo 200 years ago.
Instead we have halfwits still think about self sufficiency in industries that have long gone.
OK dear.
How to answer this interesting stream of consciousness?
Nobody has suggested that we should be self-sufficient in garment manufacture. There would be little point - it would be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to wear.
I have made the relatively simple (though sadly not simple enough it would appear) argument that we should encourage more high value manufacturing in areas that have historically benefitted from such industries but are now prevented from doing so by the extraordinarily high costs associated with making anything. I don't really see how that is remotely contentious - I suspect even Keir Starmer would nod along, but sadly it seems to be beyond the wit or imagination of some PBers to conceive of such a situation.
That photo being from a low value mass-market garment factory doesn't serve your argument, it serves my argument. If a massive factory in China still needs to employ people sewing each garment, that amply confirms that you can't operate a garment factory on two cleaners and a robot, which was the suggestion I refuted by posting it.
The accuracy or otherwise of clothing being made in Wales, whilst interesting, is also not a pillar of my argument - the clothes were made exclusively in the UK, so the point stands. I could quite easily trash your arguments because you can't spell 'Lancashire' correctly, but I'd rather do so on the basis that your argument is shit.
Your knowledge of the sector is clearly virtually zero - there is still a lot of high quality textile and clothing manufacture in the UK - hanging on by a proverbial thread in the face of the ridiculous costs imposed by Government. Make these costs less, and business can thrive once again.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
Estimates of costs -- see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2448-9 -- put it at the low end of other carbon capture, but not massively lower and probably still more expensive than planting trees.
Cost assessment is needed to evaluate commercial feasibility of ERW and to put a price on climate mitigation actions (Extended Data Fig. 4). Our cost estimates based on current prices (2019 US dollars, throughout) fall within the range of prior ERW assessments (US$75–250 per tonne of CO2) [...]
Defined as the cost of CDR and storage, the price of carbon is a proposed economic enabler for bringing CDR strategies to market11. Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050. Costs per tonne of CO2 removed by ERW are generally within this projected carbon price range in all nations, but unit costs increase when cropland area exceeds the optimal fraction, because the efficiency of weathering and CDR falls (Fig. 3; Table 1). A carbon price of US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 would cover most of the ERW costs for the key nations reported here. It would make ERW an economically attractive option for fast-growing nations, such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico, given their estimated CO2 extraction costs of around US$75–100 per tonne of CO2 (Fig. 3; Table 1).
Our estimated ERW costs of CDR for nations are comparable to estimates summarized for BECCS [bio-energy with carbon capture and storage] (US$100–200 per tonne of CO2), direct air capture and storage (US$100–300 per tonne of CO2), and biochar (US$30–US$120 per tonne of CO2), but higher than estimates for soil organic carbon sequestration (US$0–10 per tonne of CO2)23. Afforestation/reforestation and practices that increase soil carbon in natural ecosystems, including wetland restoration, have lower estimated costs (
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
So, I last looked at this about 15 years ago when one of the carbon trading businesses did some research, and - IIRC - the basic principle is fairly simple and sound: so, silicate and carbonate minerals in finely ground rock naturally react with CO₂ and water in the atmosphere, forming bicarbonates and these eventually wash into the ocean.
The issues were two fold: firstly, scaling it up is difficult because you need to move a *lot* of rock dust around (and you also need a while industrial process around collecting and grinding rock, *and* said grinding was extremely energy intensive.); secondly, farmers tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, and offering to spread rock dust over their fields was met with scepticism. In particular, there were concerns that if five years later it was found to cause stomach cancer or something, then the people who'd spread rock dust on their fields were going to be fucked.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
Part of the problem is the Woke academic world-view that Cannibalism Never Happened, and where it is mentioned by older or dead researchers it is always racist/Orientalist/whateverist worldviews imposed on non-white or ancient peoples
This is a real thing, and it reaches quite mad levels. I found a serious paper, written recently, that claims the Aztecs never practised human sacrifice or torture, it was all made up by the racist Spaniards. Utterly insane
So modern academics grow up with this "all peaceful", "noble savage" perspective on any ancient or non-white society and then get very surprised when they find utterly incontrovertible proof of the opposite
The myth of the Noble Savage is both very stupid, and extremely persistent.
Ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery don’t become nicer when practised by non- Europeans.
It is extremely hard to find any significant human society in history that isn't marked by violence - murder, war, sacrifice. The earliest civilisation we know of, the Tas Tepeler in Turkey (eg Gobekli Tepe etc) is now showing evidence of human sacrifice, and an associated cult of the skull (like the Aztecs with their skull racks)
Not to forget paranoia, avarice, cruelty, ignorance, sloth, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. These things are part of human nature along with all the good stuff. But so what? What's important is we try to promote the latter at the expense of the former. This right wing national populism that's having a moment right now, the Trumps the Farages the AfDs the "make x great agains" of this world do the opposite. This is why I despise them all.
Thanks for that, Aristotle
Well you started it. But seriously, you should take a leaf.
It is said that politicians do monitor this site, so I am hoping that Mr Miliband somehow gets to hear this:
There is growing antipathy toward solar in some areas, which is unfortunate, mainly driven by the ad hoc nature of the developments.
The attitude of Miliband seems to be "hey you country dwellers! Don't like that beautiful areas are being carpeted with shiney solar panels? Well fuck you! We all have to do our bit"
This could be replaced by a sensible joined up strategic policy that identifies fields adjacent to major arterial routes. A motorway scenery is rarely going to made worse by line upon line of solar farm, and large areas are not adjacent to people's houses. It should also make the infrastructure building easier.
This way you might find you get less opposition, which does stop you from getting your power trip of overriding these irritants with the stroke of your bureaucratic pen, but it is in the best interests of general support for renewables that they are put in places that do not piss people off.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
Estimates of costs -- see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2448-9 -- put it at the low end of other carbon capture, but not massively lower and probably still more expensive than planting trees.
Cost assessment is needed to evaluate commercial feasibility of ERW and to put a price on climate mitigation actions (Extended Data Fig. 4). Our cost estimates based on current prices (2019 US dollars, throughout) fall within the range of prior ERW assessments (US$75–250 per tonne of CO2) [...]
Defined as the cost of CDR and storage, the price of carbon is a proposed economic enabler for bringing CDR strategies to market11. Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050. Costs per tonne of CO2 removed by ERW are generally within this projected carbon price range in all nations, but unit costs increase when cropland area exceeds the optimal fraction, because the efficiency of weathering and CDR falls (Fig. 3; Table 1). A carbon price of US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 would cover most of the ERW costs for the key nations reported here. It would make ERW an economically attractive option for fast-growing nations, such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico, given their estimated CO2 extraction costs of around US$75–100 per tonne of CO2 (Fig. 3; Table 1).
Our estimated ERW costs of CDR for nations are comparable to estimates summarized for BECCS [bio-energy with carbon capture and storage] (US$100–200 per tonne of CO2), direct air capture and storage (US$100–300 per tonne of CO2), and biochar (US$30–US$120 per tonne of CO2), but higher than estimates for soil organic carbon sequestration (US$0–10 per tonne of CO2)23. Afforestation/reforestation and practices that increase soil carbon in natural ecosystems, including wetland restoration, have lower estimated costs (
Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050
Ed's scheme is for 8 million tonnes at £21.7 Bn though. Still doesn't add up even on these figures.
ALSO allowing people to attack politicians (esp ones we don't like) and merely giving them a slapped wrist (suspended sentence) just ensures that the quality of MPs will further decline. Like, who the fuck will want to do this job if society won't even protect their physical safety?
That girl should have got a deterrent sentence like the prison sentence the man got for threatening Miliband, verbally, with murder
Do that a few times and people will STOP attacking MPs - and then maybe bright, talented but nervous people will be more likely to try politics as a career
Utterly risible anyone comparing throwing eggs, milkshakes, herring or flour at politicians with targeted murders by the IRA or Islamic terrorists.
3 year jail cells for throwing a milkshake ?
No wonder people happy to live on their knees, cowed by the great and good.
Local government reform has always been political. The Redcliffe Maud Commission was set up by the Wilson Government as part of its reform agenda. I was distantly involved as part of the academic research unit headed by Jim Sharpe. The main argument was that the governing structure should be related to under pinning social and economic realities. Hence the concept of city regions based on things like commuting patterns and bus networks. However the Conservatives saw that as the towns taking over their suburban and rural hinterlands and when they returned to power they set up a system of powerful counties and relatively weak districts. Since then there have been attempts to meddle with the system - again often for political reasons ( e.g. the abolition of the GLC). Powerful mayors based in large cities and towns is the latest Labour effort.
Our new Green Industrial Partnership with Norway will harness the UK’s unique potential to become a world-leader in carbon capture.
My government will deliver our Plan for Change, reigniting industrial heartlands and putting more money in working people’s pockets.
According to the GOV'Ts OWN NUMBERS we emit 486 million tonnes of Co2e per year.
£21.7 Bn is going to reduce that by 8.5 million tonnes (Whether it does or not for that price is debatable but let's go with it).
UK Gov't spend is £1189 Bn according to Google
£21.7/£1189 Bn = 1.8%
8.5 m tonnes / 486 m = 1.75%
So the Gov't would spend the entirety of it's overall spend pro rata to achieve net zero if CC was scaled up (It is pro rata almost 1:1 for the overall emissions reduction).
It's absolutely bonkers & bear in mind these are gov't figures so the cash spend is probably an underestimate and CO2 reduced an under.
It doesn't work like that. The transport and storage infrastructure will have spare capacity that will not be used by the first tranche of capture projects. Therefore, you can double the annual tonnes of CO2 captured and stored without doubling the cost.
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
We could do this for a fraction of the price by dressing agricultural fields with British-mined rock dust, the amount of carbon drawdown being entirely measurable by soil analysis. Estimated at 45% of our Net Zero requirements. With the side benefit of reducing soil erosion, remineralising soil (enriching produce) and potentially improving yield too.
Estimates of costs -- see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2448-9 -- put it at the low end of other carbon capture, but not massively lower and probably still more expensive than planting trees.
Cost assessment is needed to evaluate commercial feasibility of ERW and to put a price on climate mitigation actions (Extended Data Fig. 4). Our cost estimates based on current prices (2019 US dollars, throughout) fall within the range of prior ERW assessments (US$75–250 per tonne of CO2) [...]
Defined as the cost of CDR and storage, the price of carbon is a proposed economic enabler for bringing CDR strategies to market11. Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050. Costs per tonne of CO2 removed by ERW are generally within this projected carbon price range in all nations, but unit costs increase when cropland area exceeds the optimal fraction, because the efficiency of weathering and CDR falls (Fig. 3; Table 1). A carbon price of US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 would cover most of the ERW costs for the key nations reported here. It would make ERW an economically attractive option for fast-growing nations, such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico, given their estimated CO2 extraction costs of around US$75–100 per tonne of CO2 (Fig. 3; Table 1).
Our estimated ERW costs of CDR for nations are comparable to estimates summarized for BECCS [bio-energy with carbon capture and storage] (US$100–200 per tonne of CO2), direct air capture and storage (US$100–300 per tonne of CO2), and biochar (US$30–US$120 per tonne of CO2), but higher than estimates for soil organic carbon sequestration (US$0–10 per tonne of CO2)23. Afforestation/reforestation and practices that increase soil carbon in natural ecosystems, including wetland restoration, have lower estimated costs (
Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050
Ed's scheme is for 8 million tonnes at £21.7 Bn though. Still doesn't add up even on these figures.
All Ed has done is make the most expensive means of generating electricity even more expensive while the rest of the market is going to make electricity generated from gas a smaller and smaller percentage of what we consume
Local government reform has always been political. The Redcliffe Maud Commission was set up by the Wilson Government as part of its reform agenda. I was distantly involved as part of the academic research unit headed by Jim Sharpe. The main argument was that the governing structure should be related to under pinning social and economic realities. Hence the concept of city regions based on things like commuting patterns and bus networks. However the Conservatives saw that as the towns taking over their suburban and rural hinterlands and when they returned to power they set up a system of powerful counties and relatively weak districts. Since then there have been attempts to meddle with the system - again often for political reasons ( e.g. the abolition of the GLC). Powerful mayors based in large cities and towns is the latest Labour effort.
Worth pointing out that the drive for powerful urban mayors was an Osborneism.
I wrote a dissertation on local government reform, with a heavy focus on Redcliffe Maud. Even then, my rather weak conclusion was that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. On the continuum of rationalist to romantic, I've swung very marginally to the romantic over the last 30 years. I'd like a local government structure that people can identify with. That doesn't necessarily correspond to commmuting patterns.
What I most want, of course, is an immutable system of sub-national divisions such that I can ask a question like "how many teams from Cheshire have ever played in the football league" without then having to explain what I mean by "Cheshire" (or indeed "the football league"). That doesn't necessarily have to correspond to local government, though there are certain advantages to it doing so. If we have to start again at year zero, so be it. As long as we can then leave it untouched for another thousand years.
Comments
Economies of scale, and all that.
Then there should be learning by doing, so that the cost of future capture projects comes down. Hopefully.
Oh, and you seem to be conflating annual CO2 figures and lifetime cost figures.
No gold star, I'm afraid.
It's a no brainer, but then so is Ed Milliband.
He went back a couple of years later after a refit, and it was totally different. Fewer people, less noise and chaotic bustle, and the air was clear. They also made *a lot* more TVs.
That girl should have got a deterrent sentence like the prison sentence the man got for threatening Miliband, verbally, with murder
Do that a few times and people will STOP attacking MPs - and then maybe bright, talented but nervous people will be more likely to try politics as a career
You are embarrassing yourself.
Mass textile manufacturing like the image you posted, is far from high quality manufacturing.
The last time the UK had it, it survived on bringing cheap labour from the subcontinent to work in the industry in Lamcashire & Yorkshire mill towns, Leicester, Glasgow, East London etc
"Wales ..... it made all M&S clothes until the 90s"
I mean, where do you go with this utter rubbish.
It's not even remotely close to being half true.
My opposition is based on comparative advantage as set out by Ricardo 200 years ago.
Instead we have halfwits still think about self sufficiency in industries that have long gone.
https://x.com/maxkendix/status/1868666890853421063
EXCLUSIVE
Some local elections *will* be postponed from May '25. All 21 county councils asked to send in restructuring plans by mid-January. Ministers select a first round of councils and lay legislation to postpone elections by mid to late February. Postponed till '26 or '27.
Oh, wait. J Thorpe, C Smith...
You're right.
It's also dumb: Labour is barely defending any seats this time around.
But that's actually a good example, in its weird way
Now if this had been six months earlier the new April 2025 election would be for the new council and continuation old one but the timing makes that impossible here so you may as well delay things
@SkyNews
BREAKING: Lucy Letby's legal team has said the lead prosecution expert has "now changed his mind" on the cause of death of three babies, meaning all of her convictions should be reviewed.
Which won't stop some people making a fuss, of course.
(Though the timeframe for all this looks very tight- proposals within a month, roughly half of which will be lost to Christmas. Maybe that's the point- don't give people time to quibble about the details, when anyone with half a brain could draw the map that reasonably meets the criteria in an afternoon.)
You need something like olivine, which naturally weathers by absorbing CO2. Plenty of that in Greenland, for example, where doing exactly what you advocate has been proposed. They could then sell carbon offsets to high emitters.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BQKV-wKR2mQ
I've no way of telling how generalisable these (dated) experiences are. But they left me with a toleration of America rare among my communist friends at the time.
[Not sure a superquarry on Mull or Skye will go down well]
Incidentally, in our all-out elections in Bradford in 2026, the third placed winner in each ward will be up for reelection in 2027.
IIRC, there was a similar set up in Leeds a few years ago when there were boundary changes there.
The issues were two fold: firstly, scaling it up is difficult because you need to move a *lot* of rock dust around (and you also need a while industrial process around collecting and grinding rock, *and* said grinding was extremely energy intensive.); secondly, farmers tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, and offering to spread rock dust over their fields was met with scepticism. In particular, there were concerns that if five years later it was found to cause stomach cancer or something, then the people who'd spread rock dust on their fields were going to be fucked.
OK dear.
How to answer this interesting stream of consciousness?
Nobody has suggested that we should be self-sufficient in garment manufacture. There would be little point - it would be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to wear.
I have made the relatively simple (though sadly not simple enough it would appear) argument that we should encourage more high value manufacturing in areas that have historically benefitted from such industries but are now prevented from doing so by the extraordinarily high costs associated with making anything. I don't really see how that is remotely contentious - I suspect even Keir Starmer would nod along, but sadly it seems to be beyond the wit or imagination of some PBers to conceive of such a situation.
That photo being from a low value mass-market garment factory doesn't serve your argument, it serves my argument. If a massive factory in China still needs to employ people sewing each garment, that amply confirms that you can't operate a garment factory on two cleaners and a robot, which was the suggestion I refuted by posting it.
The accuracy or otherwise of clothing being made in Wales, whilst interesting, is also not a pillar of my argument - the clothes were made exclusively in the UK, so the point stands. I could quite easily trash your arguments because you can't spell 'Lancashire' correctly, but I'd rather do so on the basis that your argument is shit.
Your knowledge of the sector is clearly virtually zero - there is still a lot of high quality textile and clothing manufacture in the UK - hanging on by a proverbial thread in the face of the ridiculous costs imposed by Government. Make these costs less, and business can thrive once again.
"Carry On Up The Empire": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MYRW-uchnI
Estimates of costs -- see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2448-9 -- put it at the low end of other carbon capture, but not massively lower and probably still more expensive than planting trees.
Cost assessment is needed to evaluate commercial feasibility of ERW and to put a price on climate mitigation actions (Extended Data Fig. 4). Our cost estimates based on current prices (2019 US dollars, throughout) fall within the range of prior ERW assessments (US$75–250 per tonne of CO2) [...]
Defined as the cost of CDR and storage, the price of carbon is a proposed economic enabler for bringing CDR strategies to market11. Carbon price is forecast by the World Bank11 to reach US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 by 2050. Costs per tonne of CO2 removed by ERW are generally within this projected carbon price range in all nations, but unit costs increase when cropland area exceeds the optimal fraction, because the efficiency of weathering and CDR falls (Fig. 3; Table 1). A carbon price of US$100–150 per tonne of CO2 would cover most of the ERW costs for the key nations reported here. It would make ERW an economically attractive option for fast-growing nations, such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico, given their estimated CO2 extraction costs of around US$75–100 per tonne of CO2 (Fig. 3; Table 1).
Our estimated ERW costs of CDR for nations are comparable to estimates summarized for BECCS [bio-energy with carbon capture and storage] (US$100–200 per tonne of CO2), direct air capture and storage (US$100–300 per tonne of CO2), and biochar (US$30–US$120 per tonne of CO2), but higher than estimates for soil organic carbon sequestration (US$0–10 per tonne of CO2)23. Afforestation/reforestation and practices that increase soil carbon in natural ecosystems, including wetland restoration, have lower estimated costs (
There is growing antipathy toward solar in some areas, which is unfortunate, mainly driven by the ad hoc nature of the developments.
The attitude of Miliband seems to be "hey you country dwellers! Don't like that beautiful areas are being carpeted with shiney solar panels? Well fuck you! We all have to do our bit"
This could be replaced by a sensible joined up strategic policy that identifies fields adjacent to major arterial routes. A motorway scenery is rarely going to made worse by line upon line of solar farm, and large areas are not adjacent to people's houses. It should also make the infrastructure building easier.
This way you might find you get less opposition, which does stop you from getting your power trip of overriding these irritants with the stroke of your bureaucratic pen, but it is in the best interests of general support for renewables that they are put in places that do not piss people off.
Ed's scheme is for 8 million tonnes at £21.7 Bn though. Still doesn't add up even on these figures.
NEW THREAD
3 year jail cells for throwing a milkshake ?
No wonder people happy to live on their knees, cowed by the great and good.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-short-history-of-political-violence/
Sky news really annoy me when they flick over to the great Orange one when I'm trying to follow the Letby news conference
I wrote a dissertation on local government reform, with a heavy focus on Redcliffe Maud. Even then, my rather weak conclusion was that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. On the continuum of rationalist to romantic, I've swung very marginally to the romantic over the last 30 years. I'd like a local government structure that people can identify with. That doesn't necessarily correspond to commmuting patterns.
What I most want, of course, is an immutable system of sub-national divisions such that I can ask a question like "how many teams from Cheshire have ever played in the football league" without then having to explain what I mean by "Cheshire" (or indeed "the football league"). That doesn't necessarily have to correspond to local government, though there are certain advantages to it doing so. If we have to start again at year zero, so be it. As long as we can then leave it untouched for another thousand years.