So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
You obviously haven't been watching the news lately. It's the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing after years of subjugation.
Both things can be true - which is why the conflict is so irresolvable. It was the Palestinians/Arab states who turned down partition and went to war. They who abandoned the Oslo peace protest for an intifada. Hamas who are antisemitic religious fanatics who express glee at the thought of killing Jews. Israelis know there's a strong desire among many of their neighbours to wipe them out - because they say it often enough.
Yet Israeli politics has curdled and shifted right as many Israelis simply lost any belief peace is achievable, and that all Palestinians would ever truly accept it. It's got to the point that there's a belief it's "us or them" and Israel is determined it'll be "them" - which does make its government behave in deeply troubling ways, which sets off the cycle again.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
People who think batteries and pylons are woke.
People in the countryside hate battery storage and new pylons, even more than the solar farms that accompany them somehow. It's probably a net vote winner in the shires if it involves any kind of building restriction.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
We don't, and we're too poor try if we did.
We do, and we’re not. Facts matter. This is about making choices, but we do have a choice.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
Presumably the SDP still exists only because all the people involved are such fruitcakes that the utter pointlessness of their activities hasn't dawned on them.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
They won't change and hence won't be a serious opposition or government in waiting. Their core message of blaming foreigners for everything has a large audience but their lack of seriousness on fiscal, their desire to bin the NHS, and their chumminess with Trump will be big negatives if they ever face real scrutiny.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
Presumably the SDP still exists only because all the people involved are such fruitcakes that the utter pointlessness of their activities hasn't dawned on them.
In their current form they somehow put up 122 candidates, getting less than 300 votes per seat on average, making Galloway's mob look like populists at just under 1400 votes per seat across a still ridiculous 152 seats.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
We don't, and we're too poor try if we did.
We do, and we’re not. Facts matter. This is about making choices, but we do have a choice.
The too poor thing you may dispute, but I don't see how you can dispute the first, as that is a matter of opinion. We for sure do have a choice, and I think we lack the political will to make that choice. Since we're not doing it now I don't see how you can say we do have the political will, as we're demonstrating the opposite.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
TBF what you said was also "Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP."
Yes, I know people who are doing that.
Optimal solution if you want to game the system, as I've often said, is work 16 hours on the books, get benefits, and work cash in hand beyond that. If you can get PIP on top, even better.
If you know anyone doing that you should report them.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
They won't change and hence won't be a serious opposition or government in waiting. Their core message of blaming foreigners for everything has a large audience but their lack of seriousness on fiscal, their desire to bin the NHS, and their chumminess with Trump will be big negatives if they ever face real scrutiny.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
We don't, and we're too poor try if we did.
Europe collectively could do the job, and we are certainly not too poor. The real problem is that the economy is structurally unsound (it prioritizes spending on housing and old people far too much over commerce and young people) and those with a vested interest in keep things that way are too powerful. The country needs to be dynamic, industrious, healthy and well-educated. What it actually is, or at any rate is fast becoming, is one gigantic retirement village.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
We don't, and we're too poor try if we did.
Europe collectively could do the job, and we are certainly not too poor. The real problem is that the economy is structurally unsound (it prioritizes spending on housing and old people far too much over commerce and young people) and those with a vested interest in keep things that way are too powerful. The country needs to be dynamic, industrious, healthy and well-educated. What it actually is, or at any rate is fast becoming, is one gigantic retirement village.
My too poor comment was admittedly simplistic, it is more along the lines of because of our priorities as you set out, which I think are politically too risky to change, we are too poor to then to ramp up defence or some other ideas after that. That we might be able too if we became dynamic and industrious and significantly altered our spending priorities I don't think is particularly credible. Who's offering that? Who's voting for it?
It's weird because even Reform voters are pro-renewables, and associate them with lower bills.
The reason that generators can make these profits is because they can sell at the price of gas. Even then, CfD protects us from the worst of it, reducing bills during the Ukraine invasion for example.
Battery storage is analogous with the irrational fears over nuclear energy, but on a micro scale.
The pylon thing is pure NIMBYism and easily solved by nodal pricing/and or a renewables dividend for those who live in close proximity to new infrastructure. Incentivise YIMBYism.
What are your concerns about battery storage? And how much do you think forcing pylon cable underground will cost? Why is that necessary when we're already used to seeing pylons everywhere?
Go scrap net zero by all means, that's a clear policy distinction which it useful to have in politics, but pylons, really? That one feels like a play for local elections in the shires.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
People who think batteries and pylons are woke.
People who hate batteries must be treated with great skepticism. Why would they not want stored energy, instead requiring us to produce it exactly as demanded - when that might be the far more expensive option for the consumer?
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
But nuance is necessary; the US is not just Trump. We cannot, and should not throw away a century of friendship. At least for now, anyway.
The US *is* our enemy right now; Trump will fuck over the UK if he thinks there is a benefit in doing so, that's just how he works.
Yes, there is a fine line to be walked resisting Trump without completely severing our long relationship with the US. Possibly too fine. What happens if he actually does invade Greenland? Or tries to stop European intervention in Ukraine? There is always going to be a point where Trump can take that decision out of our hands.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
The 2015 Green Party manifesto is one of the first I remember including financial tables in the back. They were probably nonsense, but it makes you feel better for seeing it. Checking it now I can see it was in a chapter entitled 'It does all add up', which is a bit defensive.
It also had a rather hilarious scenario at the end which was basically a prose version of imagine, about how you leave work at 5pm on your not for profit electric bus which is also cheaper, rent controls mean you have more in your pocket and the gas bills are low, then you pick up your child from the free nursery, pop over to gran's new council house, and gran's new carer says social care is free now and better funded, so he's very happy. Also school dinners are free, and train tickets are cheaper too. https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Green.pdf
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
Was Casino around back then ?
No. @Casino_Royale is one of our younger contributors, being in the thirty something range last I noticed.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
People who think batteries and pylons are woke.
People who hate batteries must be treated with great skepticism. Why would they not want stored energy, instead requiring us to produce it exactly as demanded - when that might be the far more expensive option for the consumer?
This is a bizarre policy mix. Yes, I get the dropping net zero, though I'd retain the aspiration, I just wouldn't make it illegal to have a policy that conflicted with it. But surely the priority for consumers is getting the gas/electricity price link out of the system? And battery storage would help with that?
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
The only way mainstream liberalism can be saved is if the alt-liberals stop being so silly. But we know they won't.
What does this even mean?
I've never knowingly seen the term alt-liberal before, but from context I assume it is a homage to alt-right to paint the most extreme end of liberal support as just as loony, and thus in more recently traditional terms saying the overly woke liberals are a drag on more mainstream liberal success, and yet they won't stop pushing unpopular things.
I actually disagree with that, I think the less popular aspects of such cultural changes are and will be pushed back a bit, if not as much as he might like.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
People who think batteries and pylons are woke.
People who hate batteries must be treated with great skepticism. Why would they not want stored energy, instead requiring us to produce it exactly as demanded - when that might be the far more expensive option for the consumer?
This is a bizarre policy mix. Yes, I get the dropping net zero, though I'd retain the aspiration, I just wouldn't make it illegal to have a policy that conflicted with it. But surely the priority for consumers is getting the gas/electricity price link out of the system? And battery storage would help with that?
People don't like blooming great battery storage near them, and want them elsewhere. Looking at the comments on a local new story from last year about some objections, people also think they cost them money, though I was not clear on why that might be.
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
But nuance is necessary; the US is not just Trump. We cannot, and should not throw away a century of friendship. At least for now, anyway.
The US *is* our enemy right now; Trump will fuck over the UK if he thinks there is a benefit in doing so, that's just how he works.
Yes, there is a fine line to be walked resisting Trump without completely severing our long relationship with the US. Possibly too fine. What happens if he actually does invade Greenland? Or tries to stop European intervention in Ukraine? There is always going to be a point where Trump can take that decision out of our hands.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
People who think batteries and pylons are woke.
People who hate batteries must be treated with great skepticism. Why would they not want stored energy, instead requiring us to produce it exactly as demanded - when that might be the far more expensive option for the consumer?
This is a bizarre policy mix. Yes, I get the dropping net zero, though I'd retain the aspiration, I just wouldn't make it illegal to have a policy that conflicted with it. But surely the priority for consumers is getting the gas/electricity price link out of the system? And battery storage would help with that?
It could just be incredibly petty infighting. Rupert Lowe is an investor in a battery storage company:
I honestly don’t give a crap about his renaming the Gulf of Mexico, but currently it seems to be one of Trump’s most unpopular policies, by quite a long way. https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1889566349472436275
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
The 2015 Green Party manifesto is one of the first I remember including financial tables in the back. They were probably nonsense, but it makes you feel better for seeing it. Checking it now I can see it was in a chapter entitled 'It does all add up', which is a bit defensive.
It also had a rather hilarious scenario at the end which was basically a prose version of imagine, about how you leave work at 5pm on your not for profit electric bus which is also cheaper, rent controls mean you have more in your pocket and the gas bills are low, then you pick up your child from the free nursery, pop over to gran's new council house, and gran's new carer says social care is free now and better funded, so he's very happy. Also school dinners are free, and train tickets are cheaper too. https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Green.pdf
My Solarpunk article pointed out Green's tendency to utopianism
Twelve people were wounded when a grenade was thrown into a bar in the city of Grenoble in south-eastern France, officials said on Wednesday.
The attacker entered the bar, which was packed with customers, and threw a grenade before fleeing without saying a word, said prosecutor Francois Touret-de-Courcy. Investigators had not yet identified a motive but did not believe it was a terrorist attack
Magistrate Christophe Barret said the attacker appeared to be carrying a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle but did not use it.
Afternoon all from Aotearoa on a stunning Thursday afternoon in the Bay
The Gisborne siege appears to have ended as a saucer of milk got the cat out of the tree overnight.
In slightly more serious thinking, as Reform unveil their policies, the gap between them and the Conservatives will grow and that will give the Tories a little room for manoeuvre.
In more serious still matters, the Hegseth speech has barely registered here - in the Southwest Pacific, Russia is irrelevant and China the key player and we’ve not heard much on where Sino-American relations will go under Trump. I suppose Trump could be trying to push Putin away from Xi in a new form of detente or it may be Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are planning to carve up the planet between them.
As far as Airstrip One is concerned, it seems we need to find £60 billion extra to defend ourselves from an enemy which can’t even defend its own territory. Ignoring the stupidity and the profit motive of the military-industrial complex, from where is this money to be found? We don’t do hypothecated taxation but when the LDs proposed a penny on income tax in the Ashdown years, it was popular. Could Labour now suggest 5p on the basic rate and 10p on higher rate to fund increased Defence expenditure?
The Americans have a point of sorts about defence but they have been actively involved in military operations outside the NATO area so the extent to which their greater spending is recognition of, for example, spending in South Korea I’m not sure.
As for Ukraine, imagining we could bring Kyiv into NATO and restore the pre 2014 boundaries absent a complete Russian collapse was always naive but apart from either that or the full conquest of Ukraine by Russian forces, nobody has ever come up with anything approaching a coherent picture of what a settlement might look like.
The idea of Brazilian or Indian or Kenyan troops patrolling a UN ceasefire line somewhere in the Donbas has its appeal but is it anywhere near practical and if the US isn’t going to pay to rebuild Ukraine, who will? Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE have plenty of money but they won’t help Gaza so why would they help Zelenskyy?
There are some encouraging precedents - Cyprus is still divided after the Turkish invasions of 1974 and the “Green Line” is now a tourist attraction. Perhaps in 50 years, British tourists will be escorted down the equivalent in Ukraine by UN peacekeepers or, more likely, enterprising tour operators.
"With all due respect, isn't the continued creeping encroachment of Israel into the West Bank a demonstration that they aren't in the slightest bit interested in a two state solution either?"
No, not necessarily. (I have thought for some time that the Israeli government was showing the Islamo-Nazis, like Hamas, that, if they didn't negotiate, salami-slicing tactics would eventually leave them with nothing to negotiate over.)
Incidentally, the fact that so few commenters here discuss compensations for the Middle East Jews who lost so much during WW II and after, make me wonder just how good the British universities are at teaching accurate moral reasoning. And how much anti-Semitism there may be in the UK.
How tough a negotiator is the Loser? He surrendered to the Taliban. (Even Obama didn't do that.)
The key questions are how good are his advisers and will he listen to them? Trump is all show, short term political gestures and virtue signaling to his supporters. The longer term consequences of his actions don’t occur to him as he wants the positive light on him alone.
I suspect he was halfway to selling out the Northwest Pacific to North Korea until his advisers stopped him. Go back to the Paris negotiations with North Vietnam to see how the Americans will sell out their allies if it makes Washington look good and as you say Trump threw Karzai under the bus to look like a hero “bringing the boys home”.
The irony of an “America First” policy is it ends up in the longer term putting America last.
The Freedom Party, under Kickl, who got most votes in the last election, have been trying to form a coalition, first with the SPO and NEOS, then with the SPO alone and finally with the OVP.
All these have failed and Kickl now wants fresh elections. Latest polls have the Freedom Party 12 points ahead, mainly at the expense of Stocker’s OVP.
Are we seeing in Vienna a taste now of our political future after the next General Election?
"The independent study, by engineering consultancy Parsons Brinckerhoff, showed that over the lifetime of the infrastructure it was around five times more costly to have the power lines underground than overhead. Costs per kilometre to bury the cables in the ground run to between £10 million and £24 million for construction and maintenance, compared with £2.2 million to £4.2 million for overhead lines."
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
Reasonable advice, but just partial. For many, coding is just a tiny part of the job. Unless you are part of a large team on a large project, then you spend as much time gathering requirements from customers and writing specifications. And this needs to be done before an LLM gets involved - otherwise you get GIGO.
An interesting thought is how LLMs may help with testing - in particular doing tests of every code path. Though tools that do that have been around for decades.
I can't read the article, but AIUI the king has always been interested in not just houses, but in communities. Something I bang on about a lot on here.
The only way mainstream liberalism can be saved is if the alt-liberals stop being so silly. But we know they won't.
What does this even mean?
I've never knowingly seen the term alt-liberal before, but from context I assume it is a homage to alt-right to paint the most extreme end of liberal support as just as loony, and thus in more recently traditional terms saying the overly woke liberals are a drag on more mainstream liberal success, and yet they won't stop pushing unpopular things.
I actually disagree with that, I think the less popular aspects of such cultural changes are and will be pushed back a bit, if not as much as he might like.
Isn’t it a term pushed by those righties who consider themselves ‘true’ holders of the liberal tradition? Personally when I hear folk claim to be the standard bearers of anything (eg socialism, conservatism or patriotism) it’s time to check your ammunition stocks. Alt-right has been coined by those massive snowflakes who have conniptions over being called hard or far right. Once their brand of excrement hits the fan there will obviously have to be another rebrand. New wave right?
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
Maybe, maybe not. Most programmers use system-provided libraries and APIs. It's the few who write those who need to be mathematically-aware outliers. Whether AI will change that much, I'm not sure.
Most programs do not even need to be efficient. The web means slow responses (up to a point) are acceptable once more, and hardware has got faster.
I can't read the article, but AIUI the king has always been interested in not just houses, but in communities. Something I bang on about a lot on here.
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
Reasonable advice, but just partial. For many, coding is just a tiny part of the job. Unless you are part of a large team on a large project, then you spend as much time gathering requirements from customers and writing specifications. And this needs to be done before an LLM gets involved - otherwise you get GIGO.
An interesting thought is how LLMs may help with testing - in particular doing tests of every code path. Though tools that do that have been around for decades.
Testing is actually something I use LLM for a lot. They can only partially help with the code I am writing, as my work isn't on the t'interweb as it is novel. But once it is written, getting the LLM to pump out the tests is very helpful. An agent version of that would be even more helpful (and we aren't far off that).
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
For the record, this was not a serious suggestion.
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
Reasonable advice, but just partial. For many, coding is just a tiny part of the job. Unless you are part of a large team on a large project, then you spend as much time gathering requirements from customers and writing specifications. And this needs to be done before an LLM gets involved - otherwise you get GIGO.
An interesting thought is how LLMs may help with testing - in particular doing tests of every code path. Though tools that do that have been around for decades.
Testing is actually something I use LLM for a lot. They can only partially help with the code I am writing, as my work isn't on the t'interweb as it is novel. But once it is written, getting the LLM to pump out the tests is very helpful. An agent version of that would be even more helpful (and we aren't far off that).
I use LLMs all the time to find the right library, or to implement boiler plate code, or to remind me of exactly what the correct order of arguments is for some obscure command line tool.
I also use them to compare legal documents and to highlight differences.
So long as you understand their weaknesses, they are incredible tools.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
The 2015 Green Party manifesto is one of the first I remember including financial tables in the back. They were probably nonsense, but it makes you feel better for seeing it. Checking it now I can see it was in a chapter entitled 'It does all add up', which is a bit defensive.
It also had a rather hilarious scenario at the end which was basically a prose version of imagine, about how you leave work at 5pm on your not for profit electric bus which is also cheaper, rent controls mean you have more in your pocket and the gas bills are low, then you pick up your child from the free nursery, pop over to gran's new council house, and gran's new carer says social care is free now and better funded, so he's very happy. Also school dinners are free, and train tickets are cheaper too. https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Green.pdf
That's a very strange source - UCREL. Do they actually study this?
The Freedom Party, under Kickl, who got most votes in the last election, have been trying to form a coalition, first with the SPO and NEOS, then with the SPO alone and finally with the OVP.
All these have failed and Kickl now wants fresh elections. Latest polls have the Freedom Party 12 points ahead, mainly at the expense of Stocker’s OVP.
Are we seeing in Vienna a taste now of our political future after the next General Election?
Interesting manifesto. There is a clustering of policies by the 'far-right' parties that appears to have some sort of co-ordination. Different economies have different age / output profiles so you would think their political imperatives would diverge but it seems they don't if these manifestos are to be believed.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
Last time this came up, I think the secret sauce was to factor in that there would be less opposition (and hence delay) to underground cabling. Hence your cable starts operating faster and that saves money.
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
If the gas pipelines are there, why not run the cables through them. Save on pylons and trenches.
I'm going to suggest to Reform that this idea should be adopted to stand with their others ...
(As an aside, worked for a HV transmission company and the earlier Consulting Engineers numbers are broadly correct. Though costs outside Europe are higher due to the size of the bribes local consultancy fees you have to offer)
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
Last time this came up, I think the secret sauce was to factor in that there would be less opposition (and hence delay) to underground cabling. Hence your cable starts operating faster and that saves money.
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
Perhaps a good analogy is gas and fuel pipelines, which are also dug into the ground. And there are *absolutely* no protests about these, ever.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
Last time this came up, I think the secret sauce was to factor in that there would be less opposition (and hence delay) to underground cabling. Hence your cable starts operating faster and that saves money.
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
When I worked on this issue briefly decades ago, the National Grid assumption was that undergrounding cost about 10x pylons per mile.
So I certainly think Reform are on to a loser here.
Scrapping the arbitrary, probably unachievable >£2 trillion Nut Zero disaster makes a lot more sense.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
If the gas pipelines are there, why not run the cables through them. Save on pylons and trenches.
I'm going to suggest to Reform that this idea should be adopted to stand with their others ...
(As an aside, worked for a HV transmission company and the earlier Consulting Engineers numbers are broadly correct. Though costs outside Europe are higher due to the size of the bribes local consultancy fees you have to offer)
"If the gas pipelines are there, why not run the cables through them. Save on pylons and trenches. "
An interesting idea with explosive opportunities...
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
It was very little to do with '£45bn of unfunded tax cuts'. The Bank of England's own report said the market instability was 70% caused by the LDI crisis. That leaves 30% of the blame to be aportioned between the Bank's QT announcement and the minibudget, in which by far the biggest spend was the energy support package.
If Starmer and Reeves are 'dealing in reality', how is there suddenly enough billions to splurge at Mauritius?
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
Last time this came up, I think the secret sauce was to factor in that there would be less opposition (and hence delay) to underground cabling. Hence your cable starts operating faster and that saves money.
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
When I worked on this issue briefly decades ago, the National Grid assumption was that undergrounding cost about 10x pylons per mile.
So I certainly think Reform are on to a loser here.
Scrapping the arbitrary, probably unachievable >£2 trillion Nut Zero disaster makes a lot more sense.
The ideal solution is not to engage in a complete reordering of the national grid in order to support crappy intermittent power sources, often ones that shysters have put in remote places quite deliberately to harvest constraint payments.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
The basic problem with the Reform manifesto was the same as the Greens. To have massively radical plans to set them apart from the mainstream but no idea of how to pay for them beyond magicking up a load of money from efficiency or deliberately vague tax rises/recouping. Fine if it were a few billion but not to the tune of £150bn!
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Yes, if only they could reach the dizzying heights of economic alchemy we see from Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer and Reeves may not be doing great but are at least dealing with reality - which is why aren't doing so great, they have to deal with the tough choices and trade-offs behind decisions. They might well get those wrong, but are not completely made up.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
It was very little to do with '£45bn of unfunded tax cuts'. The Bank of England's own report said the market instability was 70% caused by the LDI crisis. That leaves 30% of the blame to be aportioned between the Bank's QT announcement and the minibudget, in which by far the biggest spend was the energy support package.
If Starmer and Reeves are 'dealing in reality', how is there suddenly enough billions to splurge at Mauritius?
Tbf on Reeves, the Chagos deal is over 99 years. If you're going to compare, that's like saying Truss' budget had 4.5 trillion in unfunded tax cuts.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
He's about as reliable as his carer.
Isn't she in Qatar?
Where do you think he is much of the time ?
(I'd be very interested on some measure of how much time Ref UK MPs spend in Parliament - it seems to be turn up to ask a question for Social Media or do a Vox Poppa selfie or just a vote, don't take part in any debates, and head off to the 2nd job at the TV station.
Bit I'm not aware how we can get any data except Voting Record, which is not what I need.
(Speaking as a constituent of the UK's longest serving Ref UK MP.)
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
Sounds like a simpler option would be to remove obstacles in the planning system - the manifesto did talk about fast tracking infrastructure projects.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
It doesn't make much sense for underground to be cheaper. You need to dig a trench across a long distance; across roads, fields, etc; through all sorts of ground conditions. What can be done above the cables will be limited, as it is with gas pipelines. The archeologists alone will be kept busy investigating the route.
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
Last time this came up, I think the secret sauce was to factor in that there would be less opposition (and hence delay) to underground cabling. Hence your cable starts operating faster and that saves money.
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
When I worked on this issue briefly decades ago, the National Grid assumption was that undergrounding cost about 10x pylons per mile.
So I certainly think Reform are on to a loser here.
Scrapping the arbitrary, probably unachievable >£2 trillion Nut Zero disaster makes a lot more sense.
The ideal solution is not to engage in a complete reordering of the national grid in order to support crappy intermittent power sources, often ones that shysters have put in remote places quite deliberately to harvest constraint payments.
I can just imagine you in the 1960s, complaining as all those local town-gas systems were replaced with a national grid. You would have been apoplectic.
Good interview with General Wesley Clark this morning in the World Service. Clearly agitated about the current US direction re Ukraine. Made the key point that he thinks it would need a peacekeeping force of 150,000 to be effective which requires 500,000 “men at arms” and that Europe just doesn’t have that capacity.
Bear in mind that “Europe” also needs to deploy troops in the arctic north down through the Baltic, Poland etc its even more impossible.
It raises questions about whether EU should be courting Turkey and ignoring concerns about Erdogan - if of course it’s not too late and Turkey are so over them now. Turkey has a huge military and could make it work with the EU.
Maybe China should step up on the world stage and provide a huge number of men for a peacekeeping force - in their interests as they can start flexing and being the new global policeman and get kudos - also no way Russia are going to risk shooting Chinese troops. Maybe offer them the resources in Ukraine instead of the US.
But the fact that the whole of Europe can no longer 500,000 quality troops to provide rotating 150,000 shows how complacent the continent (and us) has become.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
Ethnic cleansing was not required to end any conflicts. That bad things have happened in the past is not a reason to repeat them. People in the ‘40s in the UK and beyond looked at the horrors of WW2 and they said never again.
I’m unclear what metaphorical gloves you think Israel kept on.
We should support refugees, of course.
So, why is it so difficult for you and for the Israeli government to just say that ethnic cleansing is not the solution and will not be sought? Why do you keep mooting the idea?
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
Gaza has been reduced to rubble. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa have not. Israel’s survival is not under threat.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
For the record, this was not a serious suggestion.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
For the record, this was not a serious suggestion.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
Was Casino around back then ?
No. @Casino_Royale is one of our younger contributors, being in the thirty something range last I noticed.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
Was Casino around back then ?
No. @Casino_Royale is one of our younger contributors, being in the thirty something range last I noticed.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Given that renewables providers are working to contracts, rather than breach those contracts, a windfall tax (that is paid back to the electricity consumer) seems one of the few ways the balance can be redressed.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
I was only really commenting on the underground cables bit, which doesn't really seem to fit with the others, which are for sure pitching a coherent political direction.
Tice argued (no idea how true) that underground cables would be the cheaper option in the medium term due to planning delays and legal challenges to above ground pilons. He cited a study in his argument.
So Northern Grid need to extend the main cable into a new part of town - that is being done underground and is generating roadworks for 9 months on the main road into town from the A1M
Last year they closed the main route from Scotch Corner to Richmond for the exact same reason. That was only 12 weeks but you can imagine how many people appreciate a diversion that was up to 12 miles...
So the idea that underground cables are easier to approve isn't exactly right...
Comments
Yet Israeli politics has curdled and shifted right as many Israelis simply lost any belief peace is achievable, and that all Palestinians would ever truly accept it. It's got to the point that there's a belief it's "us or them" and Israel is determined it'll be "them" - which does make its government behave in deeply troubling ways, which sets off the cycle again.
I've watched the announcement. It struck me as 10/10 for effort and full-throated Net Zero opposition, 7.5 for content. They pledge full abolition of inheritance tax, but stress that farmers who go solar won't be exempt from inheritance tax. But they just abolished it. So will they reinstate it just for people with solar panels?
Nigel got a big cheer from me for answering a journalist who quoted how much the public liked Net Zero, that the point of politics is to say what is right and make the arguments that shift opinion, not focus group or poll something and go along with the majority view. That is true, and this was a good first step in that process.
Reform made Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn look like paragons of fiscal rectitude and caution by comparison! That'll have to change now want to be taken seriously as a possible government or opposition.
Who funded all those deposits?!
https://www.taxwatchuk.org/new-report-comparing-the-prosecution-of-tax-crime-with-benefits-crime/
Of course if your suspicions are unfounded nothing much is going to happen.
But perhaps a study says it is cheaper, who knows. I think it being popular is the more likely motivation with that one as even if it is cheaper it stands out versus the others being anti net zero measures, but it's not as though parties are not allowed to indulge in that, the hope is that it is not too much or actually damaging.
The reason that generators can make these profits is because they can sell at the price of gas. Even then, CfD protects us from the worst of it, reducing bills during the Ukraine invasion for example.
Battery storage is analogous with the irrational fears over nuclear energy, but on a micro scale.
The pylon thing is pure NIMBYism and easily solved by nodal pricing/and or a renewables dividend for those who live in close proximity to new infrastructure. Incentivise YIMBYism.
Go scrap net zero by all means, that's a clear policy distinction which it useful to have in politics, but pylons, really? That one feels like a play for local elections in the shires.
Anyone can sound like an economic genius when your numbers are pure fantasy. And Reform's manifesto was that. If it wasn't us, I'd say try and do it and see what happens to the bond markets and government borrowing. The Truss debacle was over around £45bn of unfunded tax cuts. So it wouldn't be pretty when it's £150bn!
Yes, there is a fine line to be walked resisting Trump without completely severing our long relationship with the US. Possibly too fine. What happens if he actually does invade Greenland? Or tries to stop European intervention in Ukraine? There is always going to be a point where Trump can take that decision out of our hands.
It also had a rather hilarious scenario at the end which was basically a prose version of imagine, about how you leave work at 5pm on your not for profit electric bus which is also cheaper, rent controls mean you have more in your pocket and the gas bills are low, then you pick up your child from the free nursery, pop over to gran's new council house, and gran's new carer says social care is free now and better funded, so he's very happy. Also school dinners are free, and train tickets are cheaper too.
https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Green.pdf
I actually disagree with that, I think the less popular aspects of such cultural changes are and will be pushed back a bit, if not as much as he might like.
https://www.konaenergy.co.uk/about-us
https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1889566349472436275
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/05/12/solarpunk/
The attacker entered the bar, which was packed with customers, and threw a grenade before fleeing without saying a word, said prosecutor Francois Touret-de-Courcy. Investigators had not yet identified a motive but did not believe it was a terrorist attack
Magistrate Christophe Barret said the attacker appeared to be carrying a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle but did not use it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/13/france-grenade-blast-grenoble-injured
The Gisborne siege appears to have ended as a saucer of milk got the cat out of the tree overnight.
In slightly more serious thinking, as Reform unveil their policies, the gap between them and the Conservatives will grow and that will give the Tories a little room for manoeuvre.
In more serious still matters, the Hegseth speech has barely registered here - in the Southwest Pacific, Russia is irrelevant and China the key player and we’ve not heard much on where Sino-American relations will go under Trump. I suppose Trump could be trying to push Putin away from Xi in a new form of detente or it may be Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are planning to carve up the planet between them.
As far as Airstrip One is concerned, it seems we need to find £60 billion extra to defend ourselves from an enemy which can’t even defend its own territory. Ignoring the stupidity and the profit motive of the military-industrial complex, from where is this money to be found? We don’t do hypothecated taxation but when the LDs proposed a penny on income tax in the Ashdown years, it was popular. Could Labour now suggest 5p on the basic rate and 10p on higher rate to fund increased Defence expenditure?
The Americans have a point of sorts about defence but they have been actively involved in military operations outside the NATO area so the extent to which their greater spending is recognition of, for example, spending in South Korea I’m not sure.
As for Ukraine, imagining we could bring Kyiv into NATO and restore the pre 2014 boundaries absent a complete Russian collapse was always naive but apart from either that or the full conquest of Ukraine by Russian forces, nobody has ever come up with anything approaching a coherent picture of what a settlement might look like.
The idea of Brazilian or Indian or Kenyan troops patrolling a UN ceasefire line somewhere in the Donbas has its appeal but is it anywhere near practical and if the US isn’t going to pay to rebuild Ukraine, who will? Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE have plenty of money but they won’t help Gaza so why would they help Zelenskyy?
There are some encouraging precedents - Cyprus is still divided after the Turkish invasions of 1974 and the “Green Line” is now a tourist attraction. Perhaps in 50 years, British tourists will be escorted down the equivalent in Ukraine by UN peacekeepers or, more likely, enterprising tour operators.
No, not necessarily. (I have thought for some time that the Israeli government was showing the Islamo-Nazis, like Hamas, that, if they didn't negotiate, salami-slicing tactics would eventually leave them with nothing to negotiate over.)
Incidentally, the fact that so few commenters here discuss compensations for the Middle East Jews who lost so much during WW II and after, make me wonder just how good the British universities are at teaching accurate moral reasoning. And how much anti-Semitism there may be in the UK.
Here's just one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Libya
I suspect he was halfway to selling out the Northwest Pacific to North Korea until his advisers stopped him. Go back to the Paris negotiations with North Vietnam to see how the Americans will sell out their allies if it makes Washington look good and as you say Trump threw Karzai under the bus to look like a hero “bringing the boys home”.
The irony of an “America First” policy is it ends up in the longer term putting America last.
The Freedom Party, under Kickl, who got most votes in the last election, have been trying to form a coalition, first with the SPO and NEOS, then with the SPO alone and finally with the OVP.
All these have failed and Kickl now wants fresh elections. Latest polls have the Freedom Party 12 points ahead, mainly at the expense of Stocker’s OVP.
Are we seeing in Vienna a taste now of our political future after the next General Election?
"The independent study, by engineering consultancy Parsons Brinckerhoff, showed that over the lifetime of the infrastructure it was around five times more costly to have the power lines underground than overhead. Costs per kilometre to bury the cables in the ground run to between £10 million and £24 million for construction and maintenance, compared with £2.2 million to £4.2 million for overhead lines."
https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/pylons-profit-from-new-study
I can't find anything more recent?
Compare and contrast to overhead cables, where you need a pylon only every 500 metres or so - and placement can be moved according to local conditions.
https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1889847881424646403
I tell any youngsters that ask me about tech jobs / coding, do not just go to uni in 2025 with thought of becoming a code monkey (unless you really are massive outlier). Need to be thinking of learning skills / knowledge that you can then get the LLM to speed up you implementing it in code e.g. learn hard MATH...
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-new-homes-king-charles-fnsfp0r29 (£££)
The headline is encouraging.
President brought suit under X’s previous leadership after he was banned from platform following January 6 events
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/x-donald-trump-lawsuit-capitol-attack
Trump has already taken $25M from Facebook. YouTube is up next.
In Japan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZJBNhTDqM
(About Maglev, for those in favour of those schemes...)
An interesting thought is how LLMs may help with testing - in particular doing tests of every code path. Though tools that do that have been around for decades.
Alt-right has been coined by those massive snowflakes who have conniptions over being called hard or far right. Once their brand of excrement hits the fan there will obviously have to be another rebrand. New wave right?
Most programs do not even need to be efficient. The web means slow responses (up to a point) are acceptable once more, and hardware has got faster.
Work on up to 12 new towns in England to begin by next election, says Starmer
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/12/up-to-12-new-towns-will-be-under-construction-in-england-by-next-election-says-starmer
I also use them to compare legal documents and to highlight differences.
So long as you understand their weaknesses, they are incredible tools.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/elections/news/austrias-far-right-freedom-party-sets-out-election-programme/
Even if you accept that degree of lawfare/blackmail, that's still a heroic assumption, for the reasons.ypu suggest.
I'm going to suggest to Reform that this idea should be adopted to stand with their others ...
(As an aside, worked for a HV transmission company and the earlier Consulting Engineers numbers are broadly correct. Though costs outside Europe are higher due to the size of the
bribeslocal consultancy fees you have to offer)https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-62379494
https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/extinction-rebellion-cambridge-protests-gas-pipeline-running-9209882/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/apr/27/energy.activists
etc.
The idea that digging a massive trench through the countryside will attract fewer protests than overhead powerlines seems rather.... optimistic.
So I certainly think Reform are on to a loser here.
Scrapping the arbitrary, probably unachievable >£2 trillion Nut Zero disaster makes a lot more sense.
An interesting idea with explosive opportunities...
If Starmer and Reeves are 'dealing in reality', how is there suddenly enough billions to splurge at Mauritius?
(I'd be very interested on some measure of how much time Ref UK MPs spend in Parliament - it seems to be turn up to ask a question for Social Media or do a Vox Poppa selfie or just a vote, don't take part in any debates, and head off to the 2nd job at the TV station.
Bit I'm not aware how we can get any data except Voting Record, which is not what I need.
(Speaking as a constituent of the UK's longest serving Ref UK MP.)
Given I presume population growth is still going gangbusters, per capita GDP not looking good.
NEW THREAD
Bear in mind that “Europe” also needs to deploy troops in the arctic north down through the Baltic, Poland etc its even more impossible.
It raises questions about whether EU should be courting Turkey and ignoring concerns about Erdogan - if of course it’s not too late and Turkey are so over them now. Turkey has a huge military and could make it work with the EU.
Maybe China should step up on the world stage and provide a huge number of men for a peacekeeping force - in their interests as they can start flexing and being the new global policeman and get kudos - also no way Russia are going to risk shooting Chinese troops. Maybe offer them the resources in Ukraine instead of the US.
But the fact that the whole of Europe can no longer 500,000 quality troops to provide rotating 150,000 shows how complacent the continent (and us) has become.
I’m unclear what metaphorical gloves you think Israel kept on.
We should support refugees, of course.
So, why is it so difficult for you and for the Israeli government to just say that ethnic cleansing is not the solution and will not be sought? Why do you keep mooting the idea?
Logan's
Runzimmer frame is the futureLast year they closed the main route from Scotch Corner to Richmond for the exact same reason. That was only 12 weeks but you can imagine how many people appreciate a diversion that was up to 12 miles...
So the idea that underground cables are easier to approve isn't exactly right...