As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
I'm one of those that believes he got very lucky in his career but he was at least good and picking winning horses/causes. Well, until Twitter.
The folks at PayPal clearly saw what he was, it's why they chucked him out - and he's been holding a grudge ever since.
That must be an amazing amount of luck to become the richest person in the world, with a value of over £400bn.
Always surprises me just how lucky some people continually are, year after year. Just like that Ronaldo bloke, or Djokovic, Wiliams sisters, Michael Johnson, Chris Hoy etc.....so so so so so so lucky.
The first business he had complete control over was Twitter. It's not been a roaring success.
Oh FFS
Yes there he is the world's richest man, a man who makes more in a day than you will in your lifetime.
What he really needs is a bloke on an obscure website to show him how to create wealth.
Btw why arent you richer than him ?
He’s clearly very unhappy. He spends his life talking to absolute loons on Twitter. Hour after hour. Day after day.
I’ll stay poor, thanks.
Whereas you spends hours talking to loons on PB.
Just how unhappy are you ?
I’m extremely happy thanks and my mental health is at an all time high and has been for the last three years. Thanks for asking.
So talking to all those loons pays off, presumabyt the same for Musk
There aren’t many loons on here. But there are actual far right nut jobs on Twitter that he amplifies. I assume you agree with him and them.
Strange assumption. I can think for myself, you should give it a go.
I dont follow any social media as I think its for prats. I dont has a single social media account unless you count PB.
I don’t know why you felt the need to attack my health and wellbeing. You clearly find being challenged difficult.
So long.
I simply played back to you what you were saying about Musk. If you dont like it then stop accusing others.
If you don’t think there are loons on Twitter that he’s talking to and retweeting then you’ve got no hope. Honestly read what some of these people say and then look yourself in the mirror and say he’s not been radicalised.
Happy to post examples if you like. But please apologise for attacking my mental health.
Im aware of your mental issues hence why I was surprised by you attacking Musk - who speculation says may have some of his own. ( autism ?).
And yes there are loons on twitter which is why I avoid it. But there are loons on every site left wing ones as much as right wing ones, no site has a monopoly.
I did not say Elon was a loon. I said he talks to loons.
Has nothing to do with right or left.
Do you think SKS is responsible for the grooming gangs? That’s the loony I’m talking about. That’s not right or left, it’s just wrong.
Responsible no, but does he have a case to answer for his inaction maybe, we need the facts.
And you accused Musk of being unhappy with no evidence whatsoever.
I do think he’s very unhappy. Because he spends every day talking to probably fake accounts on Twitter. But I accept that’s not a judgment I can really validate.
I would be quite surprised. Hes just had several major wins in the last month and is about to u undertake a huge challenge. This time next year if all has gone pear shaped he may be unhappy but for the moment the wind is in his sails.
Unhappy may not be the word. He doesn't act like a man at peace with himself.
It is perfectly possible for someone to be outwardly successful, but have some psychological issues, addiction issues, family issues etc.
He has hinted he is somewhere on the spectrum so his ways of being at ease with himself are different than most.
Oh here we go again.
He's a sociopathic **** so he must be autistic. Leon will be on in a moment to educate us on his "aspie" expertise and how Musk fits the textbook narrative.
Ive said nothing of the sort Ive quoted what he himself as implied. And is he is on the spectrum and has succeeded against the world, good on him.
I was anticipating Leon's arrival and the education to follow.
Musk claiming to be on the spectrum to excuse his outrageous behaviour is not dissimilar to your itinerant joyrider blaming his car thieving on his ADHD.
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
His mother's maiden name is Haldeman - apparently Swiss-German. His ancestors seem to have come from the US, Canada and South Africa and as far as I can tell you have to go some way back to find an English-born one. He hasn't lived or studied here. He's welcome to take an interest in this country but he's not one of us (as I think is evident from the absurd histrionic style with which he conducts himself - Wooster's response to Spode comes to mind).
I believe he identified as “British” South African, which would make sense. I agree that it’s strange though that he hasn’t seemed interested in the UK itself until very lately.
I assumed he would t approve of self-ID?
He isn't a British South African
He's a full on extreme Dutch Reform Afrikanner. The bastards that fisted Apartheid White Supremacy on a great nation
Parasites like Thatcher may have supported that, no decent human being could.
FFS let's not excuse and allow this utter runt of 100% white supremisist DNA to associate with the UK
Evidence why and when his father left South Africa.
Foisted, sweetie.
His father was a lifelong supporter of the Progressive Party - Helen Suzman and all that.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
Even the council housing policy was a mixture of good (allowing tenants to buy) and bad (disallowing councils to replenish the housing stock).
There is, however, a persistent myth that the sale of council housing has led to a housing shortage. Which unless people are buying council houses but not living in them (or letting them) is clearly bunkum. Changing the tenure doesn't reduce tge overall supply. What it did not do was increase the supply to meet demand. But it didn't need to. Population growth was flat during the 80s.
It's not a myth; it was part of the problem.
Public authority housing construction, pre-Thatcher, accounted for a significant percentage of annual house building.
When the sake policy came in, councils not only didn't keep the prices, they were also bug allowed to reinvest the bit they did in new housing stock.
Basically central government selling assets to finance current spending, and keep taxes down.
Tim Shipman's book "Out" is over 900 pages, but utterly fascinating in almost every way.
On the eve of Labour's 2021 party conference a member of Starmer's team told the columnist Dan Hodges that, during the leadership contest of 2020, he'd made a startling confession: "You know, I don't get politics. I don't understand it. And I don't really like it."
It certainly shows.
No PM who understood politics and messaging would have let Reeves first and defining budget be completely wrecked by a previous and separate announcement that granny would be made to freeze this winter.
I still maintain the WFA cut was right. But I’m not convinced about the political capital of it.
A sensible politician would have made it part of a reform of old age benefits (say).
So that rather than being a stark cut, it could be presented as a rebalancing towards need based benefits (for example).
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
Even the council housing policy was a mixture of good (allowing tenants to buy) and bad (disallowing councils to replenish the housing stock).
There is, however, a persistent myth that the sale of council housing has led to a housing shortage. Which unless people are buying council houses but not living in them (or letting them) is clearly bunkum. Changing the tenure doesn't reduce tge overall supply. What it did not do was increase the supply to meet demand. But it didn't need to. Population growth was flat during the 80s.
It's not a myth; it was part of the problem.
Public authority housing construction, pre-Thatcher, accounted for a significant percentage of annual house building.
When the sake policy came in, councils not only didn't keep the prices, they were also bug allowed to reinvest the bit they did in new housing stock.
Basically central government selling assets to finance current spending, and keep taxes down.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
@Eabhal when you understand the user in question has been radicalised over the last few months, it will make a lot more sense.
You feel this way because the government has moved very far to the left. I'm in exactly the same place I've always been, just to the right of the centre right. I have always been on the right wing of the Tories but realise that to win there's a need to be more centrist. You've only just realised that I'm actually pretty right wing recently because I'm attacking a left wing government rather than a right wing one.
Once upon a time you supported Cameron and George Osborne, thought Truss was a disaster and Britain should be in the single market. You now are on the verge of voting Reform and making pretty big allegations about Starmer and the grooming gangs to say the least. That suggests quite a big shift.
And I supported Cameron when he came back as FS. I'd take him, Osborne or Rishi back in a heartbeat. I also voted for Kemi as opposed to Jenrick in the leadership election despite my misgivings on Kemi not being very good because she was the more centrist option. I said months ago that I think the Tories probably need to go into coalition with Reform to push through a more right wing agenda than the last 14 years of Tory governments.
My position has been consistent throughout on the grooming gang crisis as well and I shat on the Tories when they didn't do anything as well and got into many, many heated arguments about it on here over the last decade, especially wrt the coverup by the establishment and the subsequent refusal to properly look into who perpetrated said cover up.
As I said, the difference today is that for the first time in 14 years there is now a pretty left wing government in power so everything I say seems much more right wing in turn. I think the only area I've significantly shifted over the last few years is that I've become more absolutist on freedom of expression and do not believe that governments or private companies should have the right to censor people's opinions or speech other than in cases of incitement to violence.
I accept I was wrong about who privatised it. But the thrust of what I was saying, I still think makes sense.
Actually, you've admitted fault prematurely there. Water privatisation was in 1989, and Thatcher left office in November 1990. LostPassword was possibly thinking of rail.
I thought there were a whole bunch of things that Major sold off that Thatcher hadn't got around to yet. A lot more than just rail.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
Even the council housing policy was a mixture of good (allowing tenants to buy) and bad (disallowing councils to replenish the housing stock).
There is, however, a persistent myth that the sale of council housing has led to a housing shortage. Which unless people are buying council houses but not living in them (or letting them) is clearly bunkum. Changing the tenure doesn't reduce tge overall supply. What it did not do was increase the supply to meet demand. But it didn't need to. Population growth was flat during the 80s.
It's not a myth; it was part of the problem.
Public authority housing construction, pre-Thatcher, accounted for a significant percentage of annual house building.
When the sake policy came in, councils not only didn't keep the prices, they were also bug allowed to reinvest the bit they did in new housing stock.
Basically central government selling assets to finance current spending, and keep taxes down.
The policy continued under Blair.
But it wouldn't have been a problem in the absence of subsequent huge net migration. If you look at the last census, an astonishing percentage of social housing in some parts of the country is occupied by people who weren't born here.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
Even the council housing policy was a mixture of good (allowing tenants to buy) and bad (disallowing councils to replenish the housing stock).
There is, however, a persistent myth that the sale of council housing has led to a housing shortage. Which unless people are buying council houses but not living in them (or letting them) is clearly bunkum. Changing the tenure doesn't reduce tge overall supply. What it did not do was increase the supply to meet demand. But it didn't need to. Population growth was flat during the 80s.
It's not a myth; it was part of the problem.
Public authority housing construction, pre-Thatcher, accounted for a significant percentage of annual house building.
When the sake policy came in, councils not only didn't keep the prices, they were also bug allowed to reinvest the bit they did in new housing stock.
Basically central government selling assets to finance current spending, and keep taxes down.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
Similar changes were made under Reagan and then Clinton.
It’s not possible to tell the history of the UK really without this story.
Tim Shipman's book "Out" is over 900 pages, but utterly fascinating in almost every way.
On the eve of Labour's 2021 party conference a member of Starmer's team told the columnist Dan Hodges that, during the leadership contest of 2020, he'd made a startling confession: "You know, I don't get politics. I don't understand it. And I don't really like it."
It certainly shows.
No PM who understood politics and messaging would have let Reeves first and defining budget be completely wrecked by a previous and separate announcement that granny would be made to freeze this winter.
I still maintain the WFA cut was right. But I’m not convinced about the political capital of it.
A sensible politician would have made it part of a reform of old age benefits (say).
So that rather than being a stark cut, it could be presented as a rebalancing towards need based benefits (for example).
That is a good point. The selling of the budget has been calamitous. I suspect that is down to a disinterest in how political optics work.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money.
Frankly I'd cut fares significantly and plough a load of money into investment into new rolling stock and infrastructure. Something the last lot cut out of spite with HS2.
Norm Macdonald once claimed that Fox comes off his medication a couple of days before public appearences to maximise the money raised - now that's commitment.
Just to add to the below, I was also actually involved in the late '90s period of a switchover to a much more commercialised, lifestyle and reality-led ethos, which is when I left the sector.
The French and Germans didn't have a Thatcher, so they didn't mangle their broadcast culture in the same way at the time, and so still maintain much higher intellectual standards on their main terrestrial channels. They also kept more of their own flavour of cinema culture, but that's a slightly different topic, again.
You should be interested. He has investigated and busted Starmer as individually and personally responsible for the Rochdale and Rotherham child abuse scandals. Liz and Kemi are also on the case and they are drawing the same conclusions.
I'm genuinely wondering whether Elon will eventually go full on Carl Beech. Is there anything in his behaviour to suggest that's a line he'd baulk at crossing? That's why his admirers and defenders need to be careful. There's no telling why the guy might go.
Because of the internet we’re watching ultimately why these algorithms are so dangerous. They’ve totally radicalised him.
And in turn, it’s leaking into GBNews, the Telegraph, and the Mail.
We might be overegging it.
He's Cummings (who also made a lot of news) with money and reach.
I'll be very surprised if he lasts the course with The Donald.
What if he has a point though? (disclaimer: I hate Musk). What if Starmer and other establishment figures did conspire to turn a blind eye to these scandals? A few years ago I would never have believed that it would be possible in the UK that the Post Office Scandal could be allowed (and it continues while there are no arrests of Vennells et al). Equally Carl Beech and the blatant attempt by Labour Party leaders to smear senior Tories?
If Starmer is implicated it could be a resigning issue.
As with the Post Office, it is about the Process State.
In my header on the Process State, I pointed out that it is an attempt to replace individual discretion and morality with a rule system. The idea is that you follow the rules. That’s all you need to do. “I followed legal advice”, “my paperwork was 100%”
In the case of the grooming gangs, there was no formal rule set. Instead, the interactions between the victims, the perpetrators, the police, social services, the justice system etc created an unwritten rule system.
1) The children weren’t valuable 2) It’s all voluntary, so they are terrible witnesses. 3) it’s The Streets - how they’ve always been. 4) Recording it as crime just makes the stats go up
Note that those who didn’t go along with this rule set were treated as transgressors themselves.
Further, that the end of this involved a massive cultural change. Which created a new rule set.
1) We always prosecute the immediate perpetrators. 2) Those in authority were following The Rules. Even blaming them is unfair.
Blaming Starmer for that, is blaming a fish for water happening.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
"If we really want Keir Starmer out of 10 Downing Street, we need to push our local MPs to initiate a vote of No Confidence."
"Yes"
Radicalised and anti-democratic, God help us all.
It would be hilarious if enough MPs persuaded the HoC to have a vote of no confidence in the PM. I think Starmer might just edge it. Musk doesn't have a clue.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
Tim Shipman's book "Out" is over 900 pages, but utterly fascinating in almost every way.
On the eve of Labour's 2021 party conference a member of Starmer's team told the columnist Dan Hodges that, during the leadership contest of 2020, he'd made a startling confession: "You know, I don't get politics. I don't understand it. And I don't really like it."
It certainly shows.
No PM who understood politics and messaging would have let Reeves first and defining budget be completely wrecked by a previous and separate announcement that granny would be made to freeze this winter.
I still maintain the WFA cut was right. But I’m not convinced about the political capital of it.
A sensible politician would have made it part of a reform of old age benefits (say).
So that rather than being a stark cut, it could be presented as a rebalancing towards need based benefits (for example).
That is a good point. The selling of the budget has been calamitous. I suspect that is down to a disinterest in how political optics work.
It’s not so much political optics as political reality.
If you do something that isn’t just increasing spending on an existing thing, you are annoying someone. This is nearly always an expenditure of political capital.
Labour party voters are nearly always not fans of benefit cuts. So in this case you are spending core political capital.
If you built a benefit rework package so that money is shifted around, then you can sell it as “We took away universal money and replaced it with targeted money. So Carl on a £128,456.32 pension doesn’t get the replacement for WPA. Mrs Migins on £12,432.02 gets 120% of what she did.”
The hidden bit would be that overall, it costs less. But if you could say - “No one on less that £30k pension is worse off” - then that deals with that.
This would conform the values and beliefs of your core voters. So reduce your political capital spend to zero. Blair would probably have managed to turn it into a net gain.
The trick is to have both the policy and the presentation.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
Similar changes were made under Reagan and then Clinton.
It’s not possible to tell the history of the UK really without this story.
Indeed.
The post-Thatcher and Reagan media landscape was a very different one, and much more different from our neighbours.
"If we really want Keir Starmer out of 10 Downing Street, we need to push our local MPs to initiate a vote of No Confidence."
"Yes"
Radicalised and anti-democratic, God help us all.
It would be hilarious if enough MPs persuaded the HoC to have a vote of no confidence in the PM. I think Starmer might just edge it. Musk doesn't have a clue.
Yes, surely Starmer engineers one by accident and wins with a 150+ majority? Like it or not (and it's very much not in my case) Labour are here until 2029. Calling for another election or VONC 6 months in while the governing party has a majority of ~170 is just plain stupid.
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
His mother's maiden name is Haldeman - apparently Swiss-German. His ancestors seem to have come from the US, Canada and South Africa and as far as I can tell you have to go some way back to find an English-born one. He hasn't lived or studied here. He's welcome to take an interest in this country but he's not one of us (as I think is evident from the absurd histrionic style with which he conducts himself - Wooster's response to Spode comes to mind).
I believe he identified as “British” South African, which would make sense. I agree that it’s strange though that he hasn’t seemed interested in the UK itself until very lately.
I assumed he would t approve of self-ID?
He isn't a British South African
He's a full on extreme Dutch Reform Afrikanner. The bastards that fisted Apartheid White Supremacy on a great nation
Parasites like Thatcher may have supported that, no decent human being could.
FFS let's not excuse and allow this utter runt of 100% white supremisist DNA to associate with the UK
Evidence why and when his father left South Africa.
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
His mother's maiden name is Haldeman - apparently Swiss-German. His ancestors seem to have come from the US, Canada and South Africa and as far as I can tell you have to go some way back to find an English-born one. He hasn't lived or studied here. He's welcome to take an interest in this country but he's not one of us (as I think is evident from the absurd histrionic style with which he conducts himself - Wooster's response to Spode comes to mind).
I believe he identified as “British” South African, which would make sense. I agree that it’s strange though that he hasn’t seemed interested in the UK itself until very lately.
I assumed he would t approve of self-ID?
He isn't a British South African
He's a full on extreme Dutch Reform Afrikanner. The bastards that fisted Apartheid White Supremacy on a great nation
Parasites like Thatcher may have supported that, no decent human being could.
FFS let's not excuse and allow this utter runt of 100% white supremisist DNA to associate with the UK
Evidence why and when his father left South Africa.
Thatcher didn’t support apartheid
Another lie from a Labour staffer
I do wish somebody from the moderation team could confirm if this user really is a Labour staffer or not. As right now it's just endless speculation.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
Any regional investment looks terrible on a spreadsheet when it takes account of the opportunity cost of not investing in London/SE. So we keep on piling money into the capital, and the gap widens.
(Cycle infrastructure typically has the highest BCR of any transport spending)
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.” Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
His mother's maiden name is Haldeman - apparently Swiss-German. His ancestors seem to have come from the US, Canada and South Africa and as far as I can tell you have to go some way back to find an English-born one. He hasn't lived or studied here. He's welcome to take an interest in this country but he's not one of us (as I think is evident from the absurd histrionic style with which he conducts himself - Wooster's response to Spode comes to mind).
I believe he identified as “British” South African, which would make sense. I agree that it’s strange though that he hasn’t seemed interested in the UK itself until very lately.
I assumed he would t approve of self-ID?
He isn't a British South African
He's a full on extreme Dutch Reform Afrikanner. The bastards that fisted Apartheid White Supremacy on a great nation
Parasites like Thatcher may have supported that, no decent human being could.
FFS let's not excuse and allow this utter runt of 100% white supremisist DNA to associate with the UK
Evidence why and when his father left South Africa.
Thatcher didn’t support apartheid
Another lie from a Labour staffer
I do wish somebody from the moderation team could confirm if this user really is a Labour staffer or not. As right now it's just endless speculation.
Can we club together and bribe Farmer Tupac to come back?
He was so many orders of magnitude better at the eat-your-feet-loyalty-to-labour thing.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
The Broadcasting Act didn't completely remove the public service broadcasting obligations on ITV. It remained subject to quite a broad range of requirements that don't apply to smaller commercial broadcasters. Indeed, it still does. These include obligations on regional news provision, productions outside London, independent productions, and current affairs programmes.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
Any investment outside London/SE looks terrible on a spreadsheet. So we keep on piling money into the capital, and the gap widens.
(Cycle infrastructure typically has the highest BCR of any transport spending)
Yes, while I agree with @Fishing to an extent, this is usually the view the treasury takes on investment and for this reason the UK fails to capture new industries where nothing previously existed, 0 always has a 0 multiplier. New industries we do well in rarely get any government support or matched investment until after the private sector has got it up and running and sold 80% of it to US companies at knockdown prices.
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
I appreciate this analogy is galumphing over the horizon in hobnail boots yelling "OBVIOUS REFERENCE INCOMING", but in order to complete the circle I have to say that...
...it's unlike you to go with self-identification.
Ludicrous to make her minister for corruption. Anyone could see that someone with close family ties to head of govt of country known to have lots of corruption was a glaring red flag.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
The Broadcasting Act didn't completely remove the public service broadcasting obligations on ITV. It remained subject to quite a broad range of requirements that don't apply to smaller commercial broadcasters. Indeed, it still does. These include obligations on regional news provision, productions outside London, independent productions, and current affairs programmes.
There was a crucial provision on public service proportions of programmes, as I remember, and the IBA was the guarantor.
Murdoch hated the concept of IBA and any regulation of public service content, which I was often told at the time was why it had gone. These were snooty elitist, and big government, trying to prevent the people getting what they wanted.
I accept I was wrong about who privatised it. But the thrust of what I was saying, I still think makes sense.
Actually, you've admitted fault prematurely there. Water privatisation was in 1989, and Thatcher left office in November 1990. LostPassword was possibly thinking of rail.
I thought there were a whole bunch of things that Major sold off that Thatcher hadn't got around to yet. A lot more than just rail.
There were some including Powergen/National Power. But rail was probably the most prominent one under Major and, crucially to your original point, water was definitely late Thatcher era rather than Major era.
Ludicrous to make her minister for corruption. Anyone could see that someone with close family ties to head of govt of country known to have lots of corruption was a glaring red flag.
Minister for corruption is a pretty good fit for her though...
As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
I'm one of those that believes he got very lucky in his career but he was at least good and picking winning horses/causes. Well, until Twitter.
The folks at PayPal clearly saw what he was, it's why they chucked him out - and he's been holding a grudge ever since.
That must be an amazing amount of luck to become the richest person in the world, with a value of over £400bn.
Always surprises me just how lucky some people continually are, year after year. Just like that Ronaldo bloke, or Djokovic, Wiliams sisters, Michael Johnson, Chris Hoy etc.....so so so so so so lucky.
The first business he had complete control over was Twitter. It's not been a roaring success.
Oh FFS
Yes there he is the world's richest man, a man who makes more in a day than you will in your lifetime.
What he really needs is a bloke on an obscure website to show him how to create wealth.
Btw why arent you richer than him ?
But his politics is basement level. And that - sadly - is what he seems determined to share with us all.
In your view, but youre a snob
If it's only snobs who hate the far right we really do have a problem.
Its the way you label everyone poorer than you as far right that I find strange.
I just label the far right as far right. No link to bank balance.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
Any investment outside London/SE looks terrible on a spreadsheet. So we keep on piling money into the capital, and the gap widens.
(Cycle infrastructure typically has the highest BCR of any transport spending)
Yes, while I agree with @Fishing to an extent, this is usually the view the treasury takes on investment and for this reason the UK fails to capture new industries where nothing previously existed, 0 always has a 0 multiplier. New industries we do well in rarely get any government support or matched investment until after the private sector has got it up and running and sold 80% of it to US companies at knockdown prices.
It’s also the view of the banks and many investors.
There was a hilarious headline - Mail maybe - claiming that only 80% of startups funded in an initiative by Rishi Sunak had not failed. Therefore it was shit. The facts were, of course, totally wrong.
What they failed to understand was that if he had a long term 80% success rate, Sunak would have been the most effective venture capitalist ever. By a startling margin. People from the US would have been lining up truck loads of cash outside No. 10, pleading for him to invest it for them.
In this country, people only want to bet on the sure thing. And, better yet, the existing way of doing things. And then they want a 25% return in 6 months….
Ludicrous to make her minister for corruption. Anyone could see that someone with close family ties to head of govt of country known to have lots of corruption was a glaring red flag.
As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
I'm one of those that believes he got very lucky in his career but he was at least good and picking winning horses/causes. Well, until Twitter.
The folks at PayPal clearly saw what he was, it's why they chucked him out - and he's been holding a grudge ever since.
That must be an amazing amount of luck to become the richest person in the world, with a value of over £400bn.
Always surprises me just how lucky some people continually are, year after year. Just like that Ronaldo bloke, or Djokovic, Wiliams sisters, Michael Johnson, Chris Hoy etc.....so so so so so so lucky.
The first business he had complete control over was Twitter. It's not been a roaring success.
Oh FFS
Yes there he is the world's richest man, a man who makes more in a day than you will in your lifetime.
What he really needs is a bloke on an obscure website to show him how to create wealth.
Btw why arent you richer than him ?
He’s clearly very unhappy. He spends his life talking to absolute loons on Twitter. Hour after hour. Day after day.
I’ll stay poor, thanks.
Whereas you spends hours talking to loons on PB.
Just how unhappy are you ?
I’m extremely happy thanks and my mental health is at an all time high and has been for the last three years. Thanks for asking.
So talking to all those loons pays off, presumabyt the same for Musk
There aren’t many loons on here. But there are actual far right nut jobs on Twitter that he amplifies. I assume you agree with him and them.
Strange assumption. I can think for myself, you should give it a go.
I dont follow any social media as I think its for prats. I dont has a single social media account unless you count PB.
I don’t know why you felt the need to attack my health and wellbeing. You clearly find being challenged difficult.
So long.
I simply played back to you what you were saying about Musk. If you dont like it then stop accusing others.
If you don’t think there are loons on Twitter that he’s talking to and retweeting then you’ve got no hope. Honestly read what some of these people say and then look yourself in the mirror and say he’s not been radicalised.
Happy to post examples if you like. But please apologise for attacking my mental health.
Im aware of your mental issues hence why I was surprised by you attacking Musk - who speculation says may have some of his own. ( autism ?).
And yes there are loons on twitter which is why I avoid it. But there are loons on every site left wing ones as much as right wing ones, no site has a monopoly.
I did not say Elon was a loon. I said he talks to loons.
Has nothing to do with right or left.
Do you think SKS is responsible for the grooming gangs? That’s the loony I’m talking about. That’s not right or left, it’s just wrong.
Responsible no, but does he have a case to answer for his inaction maybe, we need the facts.
And you accused Musk of being unhappy with no evidence whatsoever.
I do think he’s very unhappy. Because he spends every day talking to probably fake accounts on Twitter. But I accept that’s not a judgment I can really validate.
I would be quite surprised. Hes just had several major wins in the last month and is about to u undertake a huge challenge. This time next year if all has gone pear shaped he may be unhappy but for the moment the wind is in his sails.
Unhappy may not be the word. He doesn't act like a man at peace with himself.
It is perfectly possible for someone to be outwardly successful, but have some psychological issues, addiction issues, family issues etc.
He has hinted he is somewhere on the spectrum so his ways of being at ease with himself are different than most.
So caring and considerate you are! ... for far right agitators.
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
Unless you're very young, I'd question whether Starmer was to the left of Gordon Brown.
Does Musk issue dozens of tweets every day, and just occasionally takes a potshot at Starmer that we notice? Or is he for some reason really interested in the UK?
Would you question why Biden was interested in Ireland? It seems natural for people of British descent to question what is becoming of the mother country.
This is not Musk's 'mother country'. He has shown very little interest in the UK in the past, and has not invested heavily in this country.
You cannot say the same about Trump, for instance.
His mother's maiden name is Haldeman - apparently Swiss-German. His ancestors seem to have come from the US, Canada and South Africa and as far as I can tell you have to go some way back to find an English-born one. He hasn't lived or studied here. He's welcome to take an interest in this country but he's not one of us (as I think is evident from the absurd histrionic style with which he conducts himself - Wooster's response to Spode comes to mind).
I believe he identified as “British” South African, which would make sense. I agree that it’s strange though that he hasn’t seemed interested in the UK itself until very lately.
I assumed he would t approve of self-ID?
He isn't a British South African
He's a full on extreme Dutch Reform Afrikanner. The bastards that fisted Apartheid White Supremacy on a great nation
Parasites like Thatcher may have supported that, no decent human being could.
FFS let's not excuse and allow this utter runt of 100% white supremisist DNA to associate with the UK
Evidence why and when his father left South Africa.
To add to the below, to understand the changes at the time, one has to understand the prevailing culture.
Regulations of public servuce proportions, rather than just independent productions or current affairs, were snooty elitists at the ministry stopping the wave of deregulation. This was also essentially the thinking behind commercialising channel 4 ; if it had to function more commercially, there would be less of this elitist and intellectual nonsense.
As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
He also believed in electric cars when few others did
He had a lot of success with Tesla. I said so above.
He should have stuck to that. It’s why I find his stance on net zero the more strange.
You used Mars as an example of why he was less good at thinking through some issues. I suspect his Mars plans won’t work. But he was right on Tesla and I wasn’t.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
Any regional investment looks terrible on a spreadsheet when it takes account of the opportunity cost of not investing in London/SE. So we keep on piling money into the capital, and the gap widens.
(Cycle infrastructure typically has the highest BCR of any transport spending)
Worth noting that the poor business case of HS2 and rail infrastructure in general is a feature of the very restrictive treasury rules of what can be monetised in the business case.
So, for example, while the rationale for doing HS2 is about a) increased capacity and what you might do with it, and b) the regeneration and increase in value of land which would be expected to come to better-connected locations (such as Manchester Piccadilly), neither of these by green book rules can be included in the economic case for investment (which is the section which compares costs with benefits). So while the strategic case optimistically notes that these benefits exist, they aren't monetised. All that is monetised is the value of faster journeys (which goes: if people value their time at £x per hour, and your investment saves them y hours on a journey, and there are z people a year making the journey, your benefits are xyz * 60 (because we tend to analyse large scale investment against a 60 year period. Because we always have, ok?)
This is why rail investments tend to look poor on a spreadsheet, even when they have quite eloquent cases.
[A minor point of pedantry against Fishing's post: the case for HS2 is not, technically, 'negative', but 'poor'. A negative case would imply that the disbenefits exceed the benefits - i.e. our improvement makes things worse - characteristically, the Germans have a word for this: "Verschlimbesserung". Technically HS2 makes things better, but not, when measured against the criteria described above, by enough to justify the capital costs. Though with the cancellation of Phase 2b and the mess this makes of the West coast Main Line in Staffordshire, the disbenefits are quite significant! This is just a point of language, however, and I think the spirit of the point Fishing makes is correct, notwithstanding the reasons for this noted above.]
This is all off the top of my head, btw - take this is 'bloke on the internet said'; I think it's broadly right but if this was a context that mattered I'd be doing a wee bit of checking before speaking!
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
“We’re entering this sort of parallel reality based on Musk’s ignorance of the thing he wants to talk about.”
Reflecting on over a decade writing about grooming gangs, @HugoRifkind explains why he’s not sure an inquiry into grooming gangs will provide any answers.
Answers are not what Musk and his fanbase want. They want 2 things. To damage Keir Starmer. To whip up hatred of Muslims. Both of these things being in the interests of their far right politics.
Heard it all now. Wanting to damage the most left wing PM of my lifetime means you are far right.
We’re not far from ‘Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler’ on this.
The original poster said nothing of the sort. Get a grip.
I didn’t say we were there yet.
However labelling mainstream politics/politicians as Far Right or Fascist I find absurd and it is a step away from that.
Do you and Moonshine not sniff a little bit of the far right about Musk then?
(for it is He I was referring to)
His support of Tommy Robinson is, I suspect, due to lack of knowledge of the man and his incarceration cause rather than support of him. He possibly takes things at face value.
I think he is a free speech absolutist, small govt, conservative. To an outsider to the U.K. the grooming gangs story would seem crazy. The story, to me, is more the establishment cover ups/reluctance to act as many of the perpetrators were punished.
I think there’s an element of playing to his base, he’s also a bit of a troll. If I was a major shareholder in Tesla or one of his other companies I’d be into him saying ‘what the fuck are you playing at ?, focus on the business’ his comments cannot help his businesses in mature and still relatively prosperous markets like Germany and the U.K.
In U.K. terms I see him on the right of the Tory Party.
His pro migration stance is certainly not far right, for example.
AFAICS his pro-migration stance is strictly limited to sectors that specifically benefit him personally by benefitting his businesses.
I think the best word for Musk is "oligarch", since
1 - He thinks he is above the law / rules / guidelines, 2 - He has not dealt with his conflicts of interest in that his businesses have billions of $$$ of contracts in areas of Govt where he has an influence. 3 - He seeks to use his wealth to skew democratic politics.
Leaving that aside, he has a bizarre value system in for example thinking it is acceptable for him to undermine Ukraine's defence effort for personal motives in switching off Starlink over Crimea, and it took a US Govt intervention to get him back in line.
Still totally bemused why Musk never got in trouble for insider trading when he said Tesla stock was overvalued, it crashed and he bought more at the bottom.
Because it’s not insider trading.
It might be market abuse but you’d need to prove mens rea
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
The Broadcasting Act didn't completely remove the public service broadcasting obligations on ITV. It remained subject to quite a broad range of requirements that don't apply to smaller commercial broadcasters. Indeed, it still does. These include obligations on regional news provision, productions outside London, independent productions, and current affairs programmes.
There was a crucial provision on public service proportions of programmes, as I remember, and the IBA was the guarantor.
Murdoch hated the concept of IBA and any regulation of public service content, which I was often told at the time was why it had gone. These were snooty elitist, and big government, trying to prevent the people getting what they wanted.
The 1990 Act was certainly deregulatory. But it didn't get rid of the public service framework for ITV (as opposed to weakening it), and I do rather struggle to see how an ITV regulated in a similar way to the 1970s and 1980s would have survived digital TV.
Important as Murdoch was in the media landcape at the time, he didn't actually get the level of deregulation he wanted and the ITV question is rather separate. Indeed, Murdoch wouldn't have minded a hamstrung ITV with a load of regulatory burdens compared with Sky. ITV licences had been licences to print money prior to multi-channel TV, so stronger PSB obligations could be chucked in as the quid pro quo. If an advertiser wanted eyeballs on its adds, there wasn't a multi-channel, multi-platform alternative to sticking an ad on in the middle of Coronation Street, and the price of a slot reflected it. Sky weakened that, and terrestrial digital killed it (hence ITV's doomed grab for the space with ITV Digital).
Murdoch likes to take a lot of credit for the multi-channel TV we now have. And Sky was important in driving that forward. But it's not as if we'd be watching four analogue channels now but for Murdoch - he was an important player in a bigger technological change that was going on anyway and bound to change the TV landscape substantially.
As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
He also believed in electric cars when few others did
He had a lot of success with Tesla. I said so above.
He should have stuck to that. It’s why I find his stance on net zero the more strange.
You used Mars as an example of why he was less good at thinking through some issues. I suspect his Mars plans won’t work. But he was right on Tesla and I wasn’t.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
The bbc still has the public service outlook, it is as crap as all the itvs. Virtually no one under 40 watches it
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Wasn’t the latter what prevented the redevelopment of wasteland in Kent into a theme park as it may have been a suitable habit for a spider
Water was privatised in 1989, towards the end of Thatcher's administration. Major was involved in it, of course, as a senior cabinet minister. But it was just about Thatcher era.
Evening, PB"ers.
Quite a few of the most damaging policies were enacted during this period, between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one. Rail privatisation and the very damaging total deregulation of British TV were also conducted during this time.
There wasn't a period "between the end of the Thatcher regime and the beginning of the Major one" unless you count about ten minutes on 28 November 1990.
Water privatisation was late Thatcher administration, and rail was early to mid Major administration.
The Broadcasting Act 1990 was the closest to being on the cusp, coming into force at the start of November 1990 (although pretty clearly its passage through Parliament was late Thatcher). I do slightly struggle to put that in the same category though. Sale of ITV licences to the highest bidder was quite controversial at the time, but digital TV essentially doomed the concept of the ITV region creating competition and looking back I can't quite see how the broadcasting landscape would be very different now had a different approach been adopted at that point. Certainly, the argument is very different than for water and rail where it remains hard to see where competition comes from - the broadcasting market is competitive (certainly more so than the 1980s, simply due to technology).
My posr below clarifies what I meant a bit below on something like a policy continuum, rather than actual interlude.
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
The Broadcasting Act didn't completely remove the public service broadcasting obligations on ITV. It remained subject to quite a broad range of requirements that don't apply to smaller commercial broadcasters. Indeed, it still does. These include obligations on regional news provision, productions outside London, independent productions, and current affairs programmes.
There was a crucial provision on public service proportions of programmes, as I remember, and the IBA was the guarantor.
Murdoch hated the concept of IBA and any regulation of public service content, which I was often told at the time was why it had gone. These were snooty elitist, and big government, trying to prevent the people getting what they wanted.
The 1990 Act was certainly deregulatory. But it didn't get rid of the public service framework for ITV (as opposed to weakening it), and I do rather struggle to see how an ITV regulated in a similar way to the 1970s and 1980s would have survived digital TV.
Important as Murdoch was in the media landcape at the time, he didn't actually get the level of deregulation he wanted and the ITV question is rather separate. Indeed, Murdoch wouldn't have minded a hamstrung ITV with a load of regulatory burdens compared with Sky. ITV licences had been licences to print money prior to multi-channel TV, so stronger PSB obligations could be chucked in as the quid pro quo. If an advertiser wanted eyeballs on its adds, there wasn't a multi-channel, multi-platform alternative to sticking an ad on in the middle of Coronation Street, and the price of a slot reflected it. Sky weakened that, and terrestrial digital killed it (hence ITV's doomed grab for the space with ITV Digital).
Murdoch likes to take a lot of credit for the multi-channel TV we now have. And Sky was important in driving that forward. But it's not as if we'd be watching four analogue channels now but for Murdoch - he was an important player in a bigger technological change that was going on anyway and bound to change the TV landscape substantially.
I would say to look at the French and German examples, really.
They have survived the switchover to a much more multi-channel while still keeping an ethos much closer to the 1980's BBC.
The French national TF channels, for instance, are still very widely watched, and feature the kind of intellectual and cultural content, and long and involved discussions, that have disappeared from British TV. So it is possible to survive the digital switchover in much better intellrctual and cultural shape than we have, deregulation is not indulged to a dogmatic extent.
Returning to the original point, that is the commonality with that period of late 80's and early '90s water and rail privatisations, I would say. Deregulation was always a moral good, regardless of how far or how ineptly it was taken.
As I said before, Musk convinced me himself to pull out of Tesla. Because he's clearly too much of a loose cannon/hates his own customers/is distracted, to not accidentally run the company into the ground.
As well as self-driving being as far away as ever (despite his lies that it's coming every year since 2012), I just can't see how Tesla isn't easily replaced by any of the Chinese companies or another established manufacturer.
I put my money where my mouth is and sold up.
The fact that Musk appears to believe, and act on the belief, that there can and will be viable long term human communities living on Mars in not all that long suggests that he may well be less good at thinking through some things than others.
I'm one of those that believes he got very lucky in his career but he was at least good and picking winning horses/causes. Well, until Twitter.
The folks at PayPal clearly saw what he was, it's why they chucked him out - and he's been holding a grudge ever since.
That must be an amazing amount of luck to become the richest person in the world, with a value of over £400bn.
Always surprises me just how lucky some people continually are, year after year. Just like that Ronaldo bloke, or Djokovic, Wiliams sisters, Michael Johnson, Chris Hoy etc.....so so so so so so lucky.
The first business he had complete control over was Twitter. It's not been a roaring success.
Oh FFS
Yes there he is the world's richest man, a man who makes more in a day than you will in your lifetime.
What he really needs is a bloke on an obscure website to show him how to create wealth.
Btw why arent you richer than him ?
He’s clearly very unhappy. He spends his life talking to absolute loons on Twitter. Hour after hour. Day after day.
I’ll stay poor, thanks.
Whereas you spends hours talking to loons on PB.
Just how unhappy are you ?
I’m extremely happy thanks and my mental health is at an all time high and has been for the last three years. Thanks for asking.
So talking to all those loons pays off, presumabyt the same for Musk
There aren’t many loons on here. But there are actual far right nut jobs on Twitter that he amplifies. I assume you agree with him and them.
Strange assumption. I can think for myself, you should give it a go.
I dont follow any social media as I think its for prats. I dont has a single social media account unless you count PB.
I don’t know why you felt the need to attack my health and wellbeing. You clearly find being challenged difficult.
So long.
I simply played back to you what you were saying about Musk. If you dont like it then stop accusing others.
If you don’t think there are loons on Twitter that he’s talking to and retweeting then you’ve got no hope. Honestly read what some of these people say and then look yourself in the mirror and say he’s not been radicalised.
Happy to post examples if you like. But please apologise for attacking my mental health.
Im aware of your mental issues hence why I was surprised by you attacking Musk - who speculation says may have some of his own. ( autism ?).
And yes there are loons on twitter which is why I avoid it. But there are loons on every site left wing ones as much as right wing ones, no site has a monopoly.
I did not say Elon was a loon. I said he talks to loons.
Has nothing to do with right or left.
Do you think SKS is responsible for the grooming gangs? That’s the loony I’m talking about. That’s not right or left, it’s just wrong.
Responsible no, but does he have a case to answer for his inaction maybe, we need the facts.
And you accused Musk of being unhappy with no evidence whatsoever.
What inaction are you accusing SKS of.
Even most mainstream Tories acknowledge as DPP he did a great job to attack the Gangs issue. Dealt with it far more urgently than his predecessor.
Did he or did he not get an enhanced pension agreed by PM Cameron precisely for this???
So what are you accusing him of?
Is he accused of not making the Tories do more in 14 years?
He could be accused for not calling for a national enquiry since 5th July?
Most independent experts agree this is not necessary. What they ask Starmer to do is act upon the regional enquiries recommendations the Tories have not taken seriously enough.
But no, you play pathetic political games off the back of lies and distortions from Musk.
It's really utterly pathetic
Starmer’s increased pension was because he demanded it (and negotiated it). Fair play to him. But it’s a lie to say it was a reward for anything.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
Yes, I'll stick up for Horse here - AFAIR he tends to not particularly value the benefits of Brexit rather than deny their existence like some. A reasonable position, if not one I agree with.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
Tongue somewhat in cheek, a paneuropean mindset can be helpful here. Why does it matter if Bat X or Newt Y is endangered here if there are shitloads of the same creature all across Europe...
This will be tempting for a lot of failed Tories - at the moment, being a Reform candidate offers a far better chance of getting back into parliament than being a Tory one. And the earlier you do it, the better your chance of getting a plum position.
The attraction for Reform (beyond a bit of publicity) is that it gets viable, experienced candidates (if not earth-shattering ones). Though they need to be careful not to become a retirement home for failed Tories.
Braverman or Truss going over if the trends stay the same wouldn't surprise me. Though Truss is by way of damaged goods (unfairly in my opinion).
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Wasn’t the latter what prevented the redevelopment of wasteland in Kent into a theme park as it may have been a suitable habit for a spider
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
The Lords stopped Gove abolishing it - opposition in the Lords with a significant Opposition component.
The new Govt put forward new proposals in July, which afaics introduced more flexibility, it seems at a quick examination to do with application to broader categories than each individual sites. I don't think it is clear yet whether this is a viable Via Media, yet they certainly need to be in a hurry, whilst also getting the strategy right for the long-term.
This has been welcomed by basically everyone afaics, including developers, environmental campaigners and Natural England. I haven't checked on NIMBYs.
Politically, I'd say this is part of the "gain from unblocking" towards their increased housing target (which I'm still calling as about 1.3 million likely to be achieved by the 5 year point - difficult for the other parties to politic on imo because the election will be earlier).
BTW, @Taz, I think you entered earlier today without using the word 'competition' - might be worth re-entering to make sure it gets picked up (and apologies if I've got this wrong and am interfering unnecessarily).
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
Yes, I'll stick up for Horse here - AFAIR he tends to not particularly value the benefits of Brexit rather than deny their existence like some. A reasonable position, if not one I agree with.
If the option had been Norway-style deal vs remain on the original ballot I’d have at least considered voting for leave.
I still maintain that is where we should have - and probably will - end up. With some kind of concession on freedom of movement.
But I accept on freedom of movement I lost that particular battle long ago. So if we are not to have it then we should have a properly controlled immigration system with immigration coming down maybe to 250,000 per year or less. But I couldn’t put an exact number on it.
I maintain the view that SKS will quietly cut immigration significantly.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
The Lords stopped Gove abolishing it - opposition in the Lords with a significant Opposition component.
The new Govt put forward new proposals in July, which afaics introduced more flexibility, it seems at a quick examination to do with application to broader categories than each individual sites. I don't think it is clear yet whether this is a viable Via Media, yet they certainly need to be in a hurry, whilst also getting the strategy right for the long-term.
This has been welcomed by basically everyone afaics, including developers, environmental campaigners and Natural England. I haven't checked on NIMBYs.
Politically, I'd say this is part of the "gain from unblocking" towards their increased housing target (which I'm still calling as about 1.3 million likely to be achieved by the 5 year point - difficult for the other parties to politic on imo because the election will be earlier).
BTW, @Taz, I think you entered earlier today without using the word 'competition' - might be worth re-entering to make sure it gets picked up (and apologies if I've got this wrong and am interfering unnecessarily).
BTW, @Taz, I think you entered earlier today without using the word 'competition' - might be worth re-entering to make sure it gets picked up (and apologies if I've got this wrong and am interfering unnecessarily).
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
Tongue somewhat in cheek, a paneuropean mindset can be helpful here. Why does it matter if Bat X or Newt Y is endangered here if there are shitloads of the same creature all across Europe...
We have the opposite problem in the UK with Great Crested Newts - rare in Europe, so protected, but in the UK you can find one under any rock you look under - which creates a challenge for developers, because it's dead easy to hold up development by finding newts that need rehousing.
All the commentary here about Meeks is rather Freudian.
He was, and so far as I can tell remains, utterly correct in his diagnosis of Brexit.
Not really.
It's only a few irreconcilables like you and him and Scott and Foxy that continue to be obsessed by Brexit.
The rest of us have moved on.
I’ve literally moved on, to the U.S.
Not the EU then?
I’d absolutely live in the EU (a diverse place), but right now the U.S. makes sense for my economic situation.
Which is fair, what's very worrying is that Europe (and I include Labour's UK in this) is become a retirement home for people who have found success elsewhere in the world because it is now actively hostile to wealth creation. The welfare states across Europe have created an entitlement culture and people think they are owed wealth transfers from successful people whether that's directly in the form of cash benefits or indirectly in the form of healthcare/education/state employment etc...
I don't know what the solution to this is, but the entitlement culture across Europe is bankrupting the continent, the UK included and it's become a negative spiral as we're having to increase tax to pay for it which further harms economic growth and the tax base and eventually we turn into Argentina.
I agree with all of this.
As ever the refrain I hear from American business people is very true - America innovated and Europe regulates. I think without the UK in the EU it's worse than ever, the regulations are stifling for EU companies now that there's no significant free market voice at the top table. I'm extremely worried that Starmer will sell out the nation to the EU which I hope that the next government will just undo on day one.
Beware of Americans high on their own supply!
Americans have never been entirely and increasingly are less (see OnlyLivingBoy’s post) “free market”.
The US is not at all shareholder friendly - the UK is the most shareholder friendly country.
The US is controlled by management interests
And yet US investors and shareholders took a 24% gain on the S&P in 2024 vs UK shareholders getting 5% on the FTSE100. Maybe, just maybe the regulator has taken things to far and companies that are beholden to shareholders make poor decisions on investment vs cash returns.
Take out the 7 top tech companies and the S&P is flat. The US is a leader in technology, largely thanks to defence funding
Take out the most important and successful sector in the world that gets the most investment and delivers the best returns? Sure why not...
Sure: but it's a sign that most of the US economy, that provides 95% of the jobs, is in little better state than it is in other countries.
And which is a major part of why many Americans are mad as hell. (It's almost like a special case of the "Dutch disease", where the outsize success of one sector pulls in capital, sending the currency higher, and exacerbating problems in other sectors.)
I completely agree with you, my point wasn't about the wider economy but about whether or not being so shareholder first is a net good for the UK. I don't think it is and I also think I'm right, look at how companies are deserting UK indices.
That’s because of the UK government forcing pension funds to buy government debt and to the flagellating tendency to disinvest from UK equities vs have a domestic overweighting like virtually every other country
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
Yes, I'll stick up for Horse here - AFAIR he tends to not particularly value the benefits of Brexit rather than deny their existence like some. A reasonable position, if not one I agree with.
I'm happy to accept that. I was certainly not attributing that exact phrase to CHB.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
Yes, I'll stick up for Horse here - AFAIR he tends to not particularly value the benefits of Brexit rather than deny their existence like some. A reasonable position, if not one I agree with.
If the option had been Norway-style deal vs remain on the original ballot I’d have at least considered voting for leave.
I still maintain that is where we should have - and probably will - end up. With some kind of concession on freedom of movement.
But I accept on freedom of movement I lost that particular battle long ago. So if we are not to have it then we should have a properly controlled immigration system with immigration coming down maybe to 250,000 per year or less. But I couldn’t put an exact number on it.
I maintain the view that SKS will quietly cut immigration significantly.
He will make noises about curbing it but like the tories the starmer person is in hock to business interests and when they start bleating they cant get workers to work for minimum wage the gates will open again.
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
The Lords stopped Gove abolishing it - opposition in the Lords with a significant Opposition component.
The new Govt put forward new proposals in July, which afaics introduced more flexibility, it seems at a quick examination to do with application to broader categories than each individual sites. I don't think it is clear yet whether this is a viable Via Media, yet they certainly need to be in a hurry, whilst also getting the strategy right for the long-term.
This has been welcomed by basically everyone afaics, including developers, environmental campaigners and Natural England. I haven't checked on NIMBYs.
Politically, I'd say this is part of the "gain from unblocking" towards their increased housing target (which I'm still calling as about 1.3 million likely to be achieved by the 5 year point - difficult for the other parties to politic on imo because the election will be earlier).
She was also responsible for dragging this country back to being a country where you could do business rather than being ruled by unelected union barons, and where even removal services were run by unionised nationalised loss making industries.
Sadly the current bunch of incompetent economically illiterate numpties would like to take us back there.
She did some good things which I acknowledge. She was a strong and principled leader which I admire.
But she also did a lot of very bad things that have caused the problems we now face. Surely that can be acknowledged.
Like her policy on council housing.
The problem is that we have no counter-factuals. If she had not done these things, what state would the country been in?
Take rail privatisation: it gave us the safest and busiest rail network ever. Passenger numbers doubled. It's hard to call that an absolute failure, and I also find it hard to believe that the railways would have attracted the same investment if they had remained nationalised.
Also, sometimes people can do things that appear positive in the short- and medium-term, only for the problems to appear in the long-term - and sometimes those problems are not necessarily due to the initial action, but subsequent inaction.
The subsidies the railways receive are higher than they ever were when they were nationalised. So my view is the improvements were from spending a lot more money, not because the private sector did a load of innovating.
To give a counterfactual, the NI trains were never privatised. They run fine. Same as London Underground.
Not massively higher. I'd have to check, but I *think*, once you take network enhancements out of the picture, that subsidy per passenger is down - at least pre-covid. (*)
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
But why is debt a bad thing when it's funding infrastructure improvements that result in productivity and economic boosts for the wider economy? A public service doesn't need to make money. .
Because it crowds out investment that would deliver much higher productivity and boosts for the wider economy.
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate tax or payroll cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
The idea that we should spend money on roads over railways is absolutely laughable.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
You seem very strong on your stance on building, but are you prepared to support the repeal of European nutrient neutrality regulations that are currently preventing 100,000 dwellings that *have* planning permission from being built? All because of the amount of poo that will go into rivers from the new houses - despite the fact that the same poo is going into rivers, because it doesn't matter if you live with your mum, you still poo?
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
Yes
I am glad to hear it. It will enrich our next 'Can someone name me a SINGLE BREXIT BENEFIT?' conversation.
I don’t think I’ve ever said there aren’t any Brexit benefits. Just that they are essentially fairly trivial.
Yes, I'll stick up for Horse here - AFAIR he tends to not particularly value the benefits of Brexit rather than deny their existence like some. A reasonable position, if not one I agree with.
If the option had been Norway-style deal vs remain on the original ballot I’d have at least considered voting for leave.
I still maintain that is where we should have - and probably will - end up. With some kind of concession on freedom of movement.
But I accept on freedom of movement I lost that particular battle long ago. So if we are not to have it then we should have a properly controlled immigration system with immigration coming down maybe to 250,000 per year or less. But I couldn’t put an exact number on it.
I maintain the view that SKS will quietly cut immigration significantly.
He will make noises about curbing it but like the tories the starmer person is in hock to business interests and when they start bleating they cant get workers to work for minimum wage the gates will open again.
He’d have to do very well to not cut it next year. Actually we can thank Sunak for that.
Comments
Musk claiming to be on the spectrum to excuse his outrageous behaviour is not dissimilar to your itinerant joyrider blaming his car thieving on his ADHD.
Public authority housing construction, pre-Thatcher, accounted for a significant percentage of annual house building.
When the sake policy came in, councils not only didn't keep the prices, they were also bug allowed to reinvest the bit they did in new housing stock.
Basically central government selling assets to finance current spending, and keep taxes down.
The policy continued under Blair.
So that rather than being a stark cut, it could be presented as a rebalancing towards need based benefits (for example).
Having worked in broadcasting at the time, and as I've mentioned quite a few times over the years on PB, I'm afraid I can't agree at all with the above.
The Broadcasting Act didn't just permit the selling of the ITV licenses to the highest bidder, but also, crucially, and subject to pressure from Murdoch on Thatcher, completely removed the public service framework they were legally subject to. The IBA was dissolved, and Channel 4 was deliberately commercialised by having to raise its own advertising revenue. All these changes took about five years to fully feed through to programming, by which time Birt, also essentially a Tory placeman, was also razing to the ground a lot of what had made the BBC channels so distinctive. By 1997 British TV was a shadow of what it had been in 1990, and I can relate more of that from my own experience.
My position has been consistent throughout on the grooming gang crisis as well and I shat on the Tories when they didn't do anything as well and got into many, many heated arguments about it on here over the last decade, especially wrt the coverup by the establishment and the subsequent refusal to properly look into who perpetrated said cover up.
As I said, the difference today is that for the first time in 14 years there is now a pretty left wing government in power so everything I say seems much more right wing in turn. I think the only area I've significantly shifted over the last few years is that I've become more absolutist on freedom of expression and do not believe that governments or private companies should have the right to censor people's opinions or speech other than in cases of incitement to violence.
"18. This work shows that the railway has been a victim of its own success. Increased demand for rail has led to new capital projects, increasing Network Rail's level of borrowing and the annual charges it must meet to pay for that borrowing. Increased passenger numbers have also fuelled demand for more, better quality rolling stock, which comes at a cost. Better facilities, and more reliable rail services, have generated more demand for rail travel. What in many ways is a virtuous circle has a vicious element - escalating cost."
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmtran/329/32905.htm
As for London Underground: they had £11.7bn of debt before Covid struck
https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/tfl-debt-1
(*) It can sometimes be hard to compare figures, as some charts and tables show things like HS2 and Crossrail included in the subsidy, whilst others do not.
It’s not possible to tell the history of the UK really without this story.
Frankly I'd cut fares significantly and plough a load of money into investment into new rolling stock and infrastructure. Something the last lot cut out of spite with HS2.
"If we really want Keir Starmer out of 10 Downing Street, we need to push our local MPs to initiate a vote of No Confidence."
"Yes"
Radicalised and anti-democratic, God help us all.
The French and Germans didn't have a Thatcher, so they didn't mangle their broadcast culture in the same way at the time, and so still maintain much higher intellectual standards on their main terrestrial channels. They also kept more of their own flavour of cinema culture, but that's a slightly different topic, again.
In my header on the Process State, I pointed out that it is an attempt to replace individual discretion and morality with a rule system. The idea is that you follow the rules. That’s all you need to do. “I followed legal advice”, “my paperwork was 100%”
In the case of the grooming gangs, there was no formal rule set. Instead, the interactions between the victims, the perpetrators, the police, social services, the justice system etc created an unwritten rule system.
1) The children weren’t valuable
2) It’s all voluntary, so they are terrible witnesses.
3) it’s The Streets - how they’ve always been.
4) Recording it as crime just makes the stats go up
Note that those who didn’t go along with this rule set were treated as transgressors themselves.
Further, that the end of this involved a massive cultural change. Which created a new rule set.
1) We always prosecute the immediate perpetrators.
2) Those in authority were following The Rules. Even blaming them is unfair.
Blaming Starmer for that, is blaming a fish for water happening.
Hopefully they launch another petition, always a good source of entertainment. XL Bullies, 20mph limits etc etc
The cost benefit ratio of many rail projects is extremely low (partial exceptions are London commuter rail and mass transit improvements). HS2 is now heavy negative.
The debt would be much better accumulated on corporate or payroll tax cuts, which generate the best productivity boost for each pound spent. Or, if we still want to spend it on infrastructure, road improvements around London do best I understand - some return £7 for each £ invested, compared to £2.50 for Crossrail 2 and about 60p for HS2.
I think Starmer might just edge it.
Musk doesn't have a clue.
HS2 is heavy negative because we didn't get on build it. It got completely stuck by endless red tape and inquiries.
As usual, stop delaying, start building.
This all started after he wasn't invited to Labours growth conference.
He's had Sunak lickung his ass and vengeful with hatred that Starmer snubbed him
He can't cope with the fact that Starmer is largely ignoring him.
If you do something that isn’t just increasing spending on an existing thing, you are annoying someone. This is nearly always an expenditure of political capital.
Labour party voters are nearly always not fans of benefit cuts. So in this case you are spending core political capital.
If you built a benefit rework package so that money is shifted around, then you can sell it as “We took away universal money and replaced it with targeted money. So Carl on a £128,456.32 pension doesn’t get the replacement for WPA. Mrs Migins on £12,432.02 gets 120% of what she did.”
The hidden bit would be that overall, it costs less. But if you could say - “No one on less that £30k pension is worse off” - then that deals with that.
This would conform the values and beliefs of your core voters. So reduce your political capital spend to zero. Blair would probably have managed to turn it into a net gain.
The trick is to have both the policy and the presentation.
The post-Thatcher and Reagan media landscape was a very different one, and much more different from our neighbours.
Another lie from a Labour staffer
(Cycle infrastructure typically has the highest BCR of any transport spending)
Musk will be tweeting that this is the rebirth of the U.K. in a minute, no doubt.
He was so many orders of magnitude better at the eat-your-feet-loyalty-to-labour thing.
...it's unlike you to go with self-identification.
Whew. I need a sit down now
Murdoch hated the concept of IBA and any regulation of public service content, which I was often told at the
time was why it had gone. These were snooty elitist, and big government, trying to prevent the people getting what they wanted.
Thank you for arranging this. I shall now offer you the correct answers and close the contest.
1. Lab 28, Con 34, LD 16, Ref 28
2. Lab 17, Con 23, LD 10, Ref 16
3. MPs 8
4. defectors 1
5. by-elections 2
6. ministers 4
7. afd 150
8. cpi 3%
9. borrowing £150Bn
10. uk "growth" -1%
11. us growth 1.0%
12. eu growth -0.5%
13. usdrub 190
14. ashes England 3-1
There was a hilarious headline - Mail maybe - claiming that only 80% of startups funded in an initiative by Rishi Sunak had not failed. Therefore it was shit. The facts were, of course, totally wrong.
What they failed to understand was that if he had a long term 80% success rate, Sunak would have been the most effective venture capitalist ever. By a startling margin. People from the US would have been lining up truck loads of cash outside No. 10, pleading for him to invest it for them.
In this country, people only want to bet on the sure thing. And, better yet, the existing way of doing things. And then they want a 25% return in 6 months….
Regulations of public servuce proportions, rather than just independent productions or current affairs, were snooty elitists at the ministry stopping the wave of deregulation. This was also essentially the thinking behind commercialising channel 4 ; if it had to function more commercially, there would be less of this elitist and
intellectual nonsense.
So, for example, while the rationale for doing HS2 is about a) increased capacity and what you might do with it, and b) the regeneration and increase in value of land which would be expected to come to better-connected locations (such as Manchester Piccadilly), neither of these by green book rules can be included in the economic case for investment (which is the section which compares costs with benefits). So while the strategic case optimistically notes that these benefits exist, they aren't monetised. All that is monetised is the value of faster journeys (which goes: if people value their time at £x per hour, and your investment saves them y hours on a journey, and there are z people a year making the journey, your benefits are xyz * 60 (because we tend to analyse large scale investment against a 60 year period. Because we always have, ok?)
This is why rail investments tend to look poor on a spreadsheet, even when they have quite eloquent cases.
[A minor point of pedantry against Fishing's post: the case for HS2 is not, technically, 'negative', but 'poor'. A negative case would imply that the disbenefits exceed the benefits - i.e. our improvement makes things worse - characteristically, the Germans have a word for this: "Verschlimbesserung". Technically HS2 makes things better, but not, when measured against the criteria described above, by enough to justify the capital costs. Though with the cancellation of Phase 2b and the mess this makes of the West coast Main Line in Staffordshire, the disbenefits are quite significant! This is just a point of language, however, and I think the spirit of the point Fishing makes is correct, notwithstanding the reasons for this noted above.]
This is all off the top of my head, btw - take this is 'bloke on the internet said'; I think it's broadly right but if this was a context that mattered I'd be doing a wee bit of checking before speaking!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/08/30/net-neutrality-a-belated-reform-eu-law/
Tried by the Tories, failed in the Lords, Gove then bottled it and shelved the bill.
Likewise, are you prepared to repeal EU species protection legislation if it turns out that this was at the basis of HS2's decision (using the advice of the quango Natural England) to build a £100mn bat tunnel?
I think the best word for Musk is "oligarch", since
1 - He thinks he is above the law / rules / guidelines,
2 - He has not dealt with his conflicts of interest in that his businesses have billions of $$$ of contracts in areas of Govt where he has an influence.
3 - He seeks to use his wealth to skew democratic politics.
Leaving that aside, he has a bizarre value system in for example thinking it is acceptable for him to undermine Ukraine's defence effort for personal motives in switching off Starlink over Crimea, and it took a US Govt intervention to get him back in line.
It might be market abuse but you’d need to prove mens rea
Important as Murdoch was in the media landcape at the time, he didn't actually get the level of deregulation he wanted and the ITV question is rather separate. Indeed, Murdoch wouldn't have minded a hamstrung ITV with a load of regulatory burdens compared with Sky. ITV licences had been licences to print money prior to multi-channel TV, so stronger PSB obligations could be chucked in as the quid pro quo. If an advertiser wanted eyeballs on its adds, there wasn't a multi-channel, multi-platform alternative to sticking an ad on in the middle of Coronation Street, and the price of a slot reflected it. Sky weakened that, and terrestrial digital killed it (hence ITV's doomed grab for the space with ITV Digital).
Murdoch likes to take a lot of credit for the multi-channel TV we now have. And Sky was important in driving that forward. But it's not as if we'd be watching four analogue channels now but for Murdoch - he was an important player in a bigger technological change that was going on anyway and bound to change the TV landscape substantially.
https://members.parliament.uk/parties/commons
But I feel like I am in a minority of one banging that drum on PB. I hate NIMBYs.
You are definitely not alone.
Finally enough to this day many nimbys have a passing resemblance to Nicholas Ridley and Thatcher
A species not known in the U.K. until 2003
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/dartford/news/conservationist-challenge-to-theme-park-proposals-241054/
They have survived the switchover to a much more multi-channel while still keeping an ethos much closer to the 1980's BBC.
The French national TF channels, for instance, are still very widely watched, and feature the kind of intellectual and cultural content, and long and involved discussions, that have disappeared from British TV. So it is possible to survive the digital switchover in much better intellrctual and cultural shape than we have, deregulation is not indulged to a dogmatic extent.
Returning to the original point, that is the commonality with that period of late 80's and early '90s water and rail privatisations, I would say. Deregulation was always a moral good, regardless of how far or how ineptly it was taken.
Link to the relevant legislation for you:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/2588/regulation/3/made
The attraction for Reform (beyond a bit of publicity) is that it gets viable, experienced candidates (if not earth-shattering ones). Though they need to be careful not to become a retirement home for failed Tories.
Braverman or Truss going over if the trends stay the same wouldn't surprise me. Though Truss is by way of damaged goods (unfairly in my opinion).
The new Govt put forward new proposals in July, which afaics introduced more flexibility, it seems at a quick examination to do with application to broader categories than each individual sites. I don't think it is clear yet whether this is a viable Via Media, yet they certainly need to be in a hurry, whilst also getting the strategy right for the long-term.
This has been welcomed by basically everyone afaics, including developers, environmental campaigners and Natural England. I haven't checked on NIMBYs.
Politically, I'd say this is part of the "gain from unblocking" towards their increased housing target (which I'm still calling as about 1.3 million likely to be achieved by the 5 year point - difficult for the other parties to politic on imo because the election will be earlier).
eg
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/natural-england-welcomes-labours-approach-to-nutrient-neutrality-logjam-87758
https://www.housingtoday.co.uk/news/hbf-welcomes-more-pragmatic-approach-to-nutrient-neutrality-as-labour-commits-to-reform/5130629.article?adredir=1
Competition:
1) Lab: 31, Con: 32, LD: 16, Ref: 33
2) Lab: 20, Con: 20, LD: 9, Ref: 22
3) 5
4) 0
5) 4
6) 2
7) 200
8) 3.4%
9) £132bn
10) 1%
11) 3.5%
12) 0.4%
13) 200Rub=1USD
14) 3-1
BTW, @Taz, I think you entered earlier today without using the word 'competition' - might be worth re-entering to make sure it gets picked up (and apologies if I've got this wrong and am interfering unnecessarily).
I still maintain that is where we should have - and probably will - end up. With some kind of concession on freedom of movement.
But I accept on freedom of movement I lost that particular battle long ago. So if we are not to have it then we should have a properly controlled immigration system with immigration coming down maybe to 250,000 per year or less. But I couldn’t put an exact number on it.
I maintain the view that SKS will quietly cut immigration significantly.
1 Lab 34%/Con 33%/LD 16%/Reform 30%
2 Lab 23%/Con 26%/LD 8%/Reform 18%
3 6 Reform MPs
4 0 Tory defector to Reform
5 2 by-elections
6 4 ministers to leave Cabinet
7 127 AfD seats
8 UK CPI 3.2%
9 UK borrowing £125 BN
10 UK GDP growth 1.3%
11 US growth 3.5%
12 EU growth 0.5%
13 USD/Ruble 125
14 Ashes 3-1 Aus