The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
Since you can’t park in many town centres, due to restricted parking and high charges, this just raises the game. For online shopping.
In my town centre it is 30 or 60 minutes free in the most central Council owned car parks, which seems quite reasonable. That is a good balance between "pop in" and "take up too much time in the short stay". There are longer-stay spots around if required.
60 minutes would barely allow my wife to do a first sweep through one shop.
And then people wonder at the collapse on town shopping.
Or you can have 2 or 3 hours in Asda or Morrisons, or be 500m out and walk for unlimited.
I think that's a good setup - in the denser areas keep them moving.
Really, all a modest levy on out of town would be is a rebalancing, and some of the revenue could be used for town centre improvements or to reduce costs there.
My local shopping out of town centre has a turnover of £200 per day for each of their approx 2250 parking spaces (£150m per annum, around 5m visitors). A levy of of £1 per day is a rounding error, but would raise 800k per annum.
It's an ideal revenue stream - a modest impact, easy to collect, hard to avoid.
Ah yes, the belief that you can “just take some money and no one will notice or be affected”
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
Arising on the margins from this, it is interesting to notice how the Welsh by election last week managed to turn a many party election (with six proper parties standing, five national + PC) into a two party election, of the sort where FPTP gives a respectable result.
AV (which most rejected) would be a good move, but no further. It would enable newcomers to build up support over time.
It is likely that the great majority of the English seats in the next General Election will in fact be two party contests, mostly Reform v Labour and Reform v LDs. The way the two party FPTP system can eat up the Tories leaving barely a trace is extraordinary. Labour's best chance is that it is very doubtful that this can happen to two parties at once.
Betting post: A certain degree of Labour recovery, if I am correct, is built into the fabric of current political reality. DYOR.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
I know it’s rehashing old ground, but the Conservative party reached new heights of of out-of-touchness when Sunak decided to announce that HS2 would no longer be coming to Manchester ... in Manchester.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
This is a competition started in 2023 - when the Tories were in power
With the requirements inequality questions based on a 2012 law - again when the Tories were in power.
Now the requirements aren't great but Labour really isn't at fault her although once again you are trying to hint that they are the proble,..
They are not based on law.
In fact, as others have pointed out, some of them are illegal.
The asylum seekers thing is an American import - in America, under Biden, they were trying to get Federal Contractors to hire, equally, asylum seekers. Which led to a couple of comic lawsuits - the contractors pointed out that under security legislation they couldn’t employ asylum seekers on secret projects, under threat of massive fines and imprisonment. The issue being the elaborate background checks required.
So someone saw this on TikTok and thought it was awesome.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
KnightOut overtes his case, which comes down to an unrealistic idea of most voters selecting candidates rather than parties. I was a reasonably successful candidate, turning a safe Tory seat into a Labour marginal, but I was never under any illusions that most voters were weighing up the virtues of the candidates - the difference was due to the minority who did.
Most people vote for a preferred party, and it's reasonable that the result should reflect that.
No it is not. Whatever the voters think they are voting for, they want to be able to dump their MP if they turn out to be worse than expected. Something that is very difficult to do with D'hondt if the MP is liked by the party.
Moreover in the D'hondt system the seat belongs to the party not the candidate. What price rebellion under such circumstances. That may not be a problem for a 'my party right or wrong' MP like yourself but it is something we should be fighting against all the way.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Unfortunately the answer to the question is that the hassle is entirely priced in. We get to pay quite a bit more on public contracts than we would if matters were simpler.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
The limits of his achievement not his ambition
Guy doesn't seem at all unhappy to have left it at that, so I stand by my assessment.
What do you expect him to say? I f**ked up and missed my chance? He seems pretty well adjusted and relaxed with life
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
It’s the generation of ever more bullshit requirements by people who have no fucking clue.
A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.
US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.
A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,
Other US allies did similar.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.
Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.
Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."
I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.
Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it
The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it
I deal with asbestos stripping companies and I have never ever seen a demolition without the careful removal of asbestos insulation within air regulated enclosures prior to the removal of the building. So the procedure is remove the asbestos and then demolish the building or remove the asbestos and refurbish the building. Smashing it down with nibblers to leave a big pile of asbestos contaminated demolition waste would in our country breach the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and require ALL the construction rubble to be deposited in a (hazardous) asbestos only landfill cell.
So what Bessant has suggested is an absolute crock.
Yeh, but Trump doesn't like woke red tape measures like those.
If his entire family and cabinet die of asbestosis that would be an epic example of karma.
Mesothelioma would be more likely
To be honest I’m not fussy
Asbestosis is rarely fatal
It is always fatal, but one dies of mesothelioma cancer.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
The limits of his achievement not his ambition
Guy doesn't seem at all unhappy to have left it at that, so I stand by my assessment.
What do you expect him to say? I f**ked up and missed my chance? He seems pretty well adjusted and relaxed with life
Well, to some extent he did.
But when you consider not only how many people never get to be PM, and how nobody from a clearly defined ethnic minority (leaving aside, for the moment, the complicated question of Boris Johnson and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool's ancestries) had done so before, he did achieve far beyond what most people with an interest in politics could hope to have done.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Indeed. So adding to it makes little sense. We should be cutting it.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
Arising on the margins from this, it is interesting to notice how the Welsh by election last week managed to turn a many party election (with six proper parties standing, five national + PC) into a two party election, of the sort where FPTP gives a respectable result.
There were 8 proper parties standing - 5 GB wide, 1 E&W, and 2 W only.
But there were no local independents or novelty parties (mrlp etc)
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
The limits of his achievement not his ambition
Guy doesn't seem at all unhappy to have left it at that, so I stand by my assessment.
What do you expect him to say? I f**ked up and missed my chance? He seems pretty well adjusted and relaxed with life
Sure, and I'm happy for him. But what comes over loud and clear is that he really had no ambitions for achieving anything as PM. Just another box ticked.
There will be (and have been) worse PMs, of course.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."
I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.
Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it
The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it
I deal with asbestos stripping companies and I have never ever seen a demolition without the careful removal of asbestos insulation within air regulated enclosures prior to the removal of the building. So the procedure is remove the asbestos and then demolish the building or remove the asbestos and refurbish the building. Smashing it down with nibblers to leave a big pile of asbestos contaminated demolition waste would in our country breach the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and require ALL the construction rubble to be deposited in a (hazardous) asbestos only landfill cell.
So what Bessant has suggested is an absolute crock.
Yeh, but Trump doesn't like woke red tape measures like those.
If his entire family and cabinet die of asbestosis that would be an epic example of karma.
Mesothelioma would be more likely
To be honest I’m not fussy
Asbestosis is rarely fatal
It is always fatal, but one dies of mesothelioma cancer.
Mesothelioma is a different disease. Asbestos exposure is one, but not the only, trigger.
Asbestosis is a chronic lung disease which often but does not always lead to mesothelioma
Indeed.
Sometimes it leads to pneumoconiosis which kills the person instead.
Bottom line is, you get asbestosis, it will lead to complications that kill you in some way usually in 10-15 years (unless you are hit by a car first or something).
Although one friend of a friend died within eight weeks of showing symptoms, but I gather that is rare.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
One of the great benefits of Brexit is that we do not have to invite bids from across the EU for these civil engineering projects. We should have had a fleetness of foot when compared with others. It seems that Brexit bonus is being lost. By accident - or design?
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
The limits of his achievement not his ambition
Guy doesn't seem at all unhappy to have left it at that, so I stand by my assessment.
What do you expect him to say? I f**ked up and missed my chance? He seems pretty well adjusted and relaxed with life
Sure, and I'm happy for him. But what comes over loud and clear is that he really had no ambitions for achieving anything as PM. Just another box ticked.
There will be (and have been) worse PMs, of course.
Given the state of the party and country at the time there was a good chance if he didn't go for it then he'd never get it. People staying at the top for long enough to weather a period of lengthy oppisition are rare now. Ed M and Cooper excepted.
As i like to note it used to take decades in Parliament to become PM, now you probably need to be a front bencher in about 5 years. Were he not content to phone it in Sunak might have concluded his political career inside 10 years.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
It’s the generation of ever more bullshit requirements by people who have no fucking clue.
A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.
US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.
A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,
Other US allies did similar.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.
Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.
I do wonder just how much shit like this accounts for our economic underperformance since WWII ?
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Indeed. So adding to it makes little sense. We should be cutting it.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
It’s the generation of ever more bullshit requirements by people who have no fucking clue.
A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.
US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.
A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,
Other US allies did similar.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.
Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.
I do wonder just how much shit like this accounts for our economic underperformance since WWII ?
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
(Although an Indonesian asked me today if I needed a visa to visit Italy now).
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
It’s the generation of ever more bullshit requirements by people who have no fucking clue.
A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.
US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.
A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,
Other US allies did similar.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.
Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.
I do wonder just how much shit like this accounts for our economic underperformance since WWII ?
And how much worse it will get.
(The possibility we'll start making things less onerous instead i discount with a mocking laugh)
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
I know it’s rehashing old ground, but the Conservative party reached new heights of of out-of-touchness when Sunak decided to announce that HS2 would no longer be coming to Manchester ... in Manchester.
A certain amount of courage, not to hide far away from the point of impact for the announcement, perhaps.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
And they probably all were more knowledgeable in your field than the DfE are about education...
Turkey not getting the F35, and the long development time of their next generation KAAN fighter, seems to have given BAE a pretty big Eurofighter order.
Türkiye’s Eurofighter Typhoon strategy is much bigger than most realize.
1️⃣ New Tranche 4 Order – UK • Türkiye is negotiating for 40 Tranche 4 Typhoons (20 firm + 20 optional) • First batch: 20 aircraft • Second batch: 20 depending on operational needs • A high-level UK delegation is expected in Ankara soon — potentially for the signing.
2️⃣ Qatar Deal (Tranche 3A) • 12 aircraft with AESA radar. • Critical to establish training and logistics infrastructure early. • Türkiye may take over Qatar’s production slot, accelerating deliveries by up to 2 years.
3️⃣ Oman Talks (Tranche 3A) • Negotiations ongoing for up to 12 aircraft. • Full or partial fleet transfer possible, bridging the timeline before Tranche 4 jets arrive. https://x.com/er_tugay_/status/1982451416879783999
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
A cool headed administrator who is not an expert can work well in plenty of situations, especially since someone being an expert and a good administrator is probably rare.
But we seem instead almost suspicious of people who do know things. Like the junior civil servant in Yes Minister lamenting he will rise no higher because 'alas, I'm an expert'.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
Interesting weather here in the Pacific Northwest: Heavy rain on Friday, more rain and gusty winds yesterday, especially in the evening. Last time I checked, Puget Sound Energy, the largest utility in the area, still had about 150 K customers without power. https://www.pse.com/
(I don't have any big complaints. The power here went off after I went to sleep, and came back on a little before 8 AM. I woke up earlier, and spent much of the time before 8 reading with a flashlight in bed. Which wasn't as much fun as it was when I was breaking my parents' rules.)
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
(Although an Indonesian asked me today if I needed a visa to visit Italy now).
There were a lot of American visitors in the Cotswolds this summer and it was a pleasure to meet many of them. It was remarkable how many spontaneously apologised for Trump. My stock reply was that we Brits had little to crow about when it came to dumbass voting. This generally led to some amicable consideration of whether Trump or Brexit was the bigger electoral catastrophe.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
(Although an Indonesian asked me today if I needed a visa to visit Italy now).
A taiwanese asked me if I needed a visa to go to France. She knew she didn't, but thought I might.
A highly educated friend of mine claimed throughout the Brexit process that we would soon need a different visa for each country in the EU. I tried to explain that this is not how Schenghen works, but he wouldn't have it.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
Can confirm about the implacable confidence. Seen it in person.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
I know it’s rehashing old ground, but the Conservative party reached new heights of of out-of-touchness when Sunak decided to announce that HS2 would no longer be coming to Manchester ... in Manchester.
A certain amount of courage, not to hide far away from the point of impact for the announcement, perhaps.
It isn't as if he announced it to a group of Mancs in the Arndale.
He did so to a closed audience who had themselves also travelled to Manchester, with uninvited Mancs very much kept out by security barriers.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."
I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.
Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it
The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it
I deal with asbestos stripping companies and I have never ever seen a demolition without the careful removal of asbestos insulation within air regulated enclosures prior to the removal of the building. So the procedure is remove the asbestos and then demolish the building or remove the asbestos and refurbish the building. Smashing it down with nibblers to leave a big pile of asbestos contaminated demolition waste would in our country breach the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and require ALL the construction rubble to be deposited in a (hazardous) asbestos only landfill cell.
So what Bessant has suggested is an absolute crock.
Yeh, but Trump doesn't like woke red tape measures like those.
If his entire family and cabinet die of asbestosis that would be an epic example of karma.
Mesothelioma would be more likely
To be honest I’m not fussy
Asbestosis is rarely fatal
It is always fatal, but one dies of mesothelioma cancer.
Mesothelioma is a different disease. Asbestos exposure is one, but not the only, trigger.
Asbestosis is a chronic lung disease which often but does not always lead to mesothelioma
Indeed.
Sometimes it leads to pneumoconiosis which kills the person instead.
Bottom line is, you get asbestosis, it will lead to complications that kill you in some way usually in 10-15 years (unless you are hit by a car first or something).
Although one friend of a friend died within eight weeks of showing symptoms, but I gather that is rare.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
The BBC are utterly obsessed with this sex pest migrant who seems to have been set free very much against his will. No doubt they’ll be reporting shortly on pitchfork wielding vigilantes inspired by their hysteria. Anyone on the darker side of the racist colour chart should avoid carrying a shopping bag decorated with avocados.
It's totally ridiculous.
"The Etheopian"
An Etheopian English teacher decides to migrate to the UK. He arrives in a small boat and is put in a detention centre
Bored he sits on a wall outside the centre and makes small talk with a couple of bored local school girls.
He makes a lewd joke
The police are called
Word gets out and a far right mob mob mobilise and threaten the centre
The man is charged with an attemted grope and is jailed for 12 months
The prison authorities mistakenly release him after two
He asks if he can serve the rest of his sentence as he has no place to go
The prison authorities say no.
They drop him protesting at a local railway station with no money.
All ports and airports are alerted. A dangerous criminal is on the loose
A terrified population lock up their daughters........
What do you think Mr De Milne? Will it fly......
He tried to kiss the 14 year old. Read her testimony.
I notice your the Tory justice secretary has now raised the Ethiopian fugitive to 'Dangerous Paedophile'. Thank goodness his attempted kiss didn't land or he'd have run out of adjectives
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.
Yep, them 128 year olds can be right lying old bastards.
The BBC are utterly obsessed with this sex pest migrant who seems to have been set free very much against his will. No doubt they’ll be reporting shortly on pitchfork wielding vigilantes inspired by their hysteria. Anyone on the darker side of the racist colour chart should avoid carrying a shopping bag decorated with avocados.
It's totally ridiculous.
"The Etheopian"
An Etheopian English teacher decides to migrate to the UK. He arrives in a small boat and is put in a detention centre
Bored he sits on a wall outside the centre and makes small talk with a couple of bored local school girls.
He makes a lewd joke
The police are called
Word gets out and a far right mob mob mobilise and threaten the centre
The man is charged with an attemted grope and is jailed for 12 months
The prison authorities mistakenly release him after two
He asks if he can serve the rest of his sentence as he has no place to go
The prison authorities say no.
They drop him protesting at a local railway station with no money.
All ports and airports are alerted. A dangerous criminal is on the loose
A terrified population lock up their daughters........
What do you think Mr De Milne? Will it fly......
He tried to kiss the 14 year old. Read her testimony.
I notice your the Tory justice secretary has now raised the Ethiopian fugitive to 'Dangerous Paedophile'. Thank goodness his attempted kiss didn't land or he'd have run out of adjectives
You have a real blind spot when it comes to sexual assault.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
The Second Death Star certainly was ahead of schedule.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
They could have done with a more thorough assessment of the risks from the exhaust design.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
We do know it came with some rather bizarre design flaws.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
The second one definitely slipped. The Emperor sent his top deal maker/project manager…
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
(Although an Indonesian asked me today if I needed a visa to visit Italy now).
There were a lot of American visitors in the Cotswolds this summer and it was a pleasure to meet many of them. It was remarkable how many spontaneously apologised for Trump. My stock reply was that we Brits had little to crow about when it came to dumbass voting. This generally led to some amicable consideration of whether Trump or Brexit was the bigger electoral catastrophe.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
The second one definitely slipped. The Emperor sent his top deal maker/project manager…
Yes but his top deal maker/project manager, his son and daughter were responsible for the destruction of the First Death Star
The BBC are utterly obsessed with this sex pest migrant who seems to have been set free very much against his will. No doubt they’ll be reporting shortly on pitchfork wielding vigilantes inspired by their hysteria. Anyone on the darker side of the racist colour chart should avoid carrying a shopping bag decorated with avocados.
It's totally ridiculous.
"The Etheopian"
An Etheopian English teacher decides to migrate to the UK. He arrives in a small boat and is put in a detention centre
Bored he sits on a wall outside the centre and makes small talk with a couple of bored local school girls.
He makes a lewd joke
The police are called
Word gets out and a far right mob mob mobilise and threaten the centre
The man is charged with an attemted grope and is jailed for 12 months
The prison authorities mistakenly release him after two
He asks if he can serve the rest of his sentence as he has no place to go
The prison authorities say no.
They drop him protesting at a local railway station with no money.
All ports and airports are alerted. A dangerous criminal is on the loose
A terrified population lock up their daughters........
What do you think Mr De Milne? Will it fly......
He tried to kiss the 14 year old. Read her testimony.
I notice your the Tory justice secretary has now raised the Ethiopian fugitive to 'Dangerous Paedophile'. Thank goodness his attempted kiss didn't land or he'd have run out of adjectives
You have a real blind spot when it comes to sexual assault.
Well, we're making slight progress. He's at least accepting it wasn't just 'a lewd joke' although he still seems not to be willing to concede it involved aggressive sexualised and physical contact and multiple victims.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.
Don't tell my pension company but I was planning on living forever, actually.
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
The second one definitely slipped. The Emperor sent his top deal maker/project manager…
Yes but his top deal maker/project manager, his son and daughter were responsible for the destruction of the First Death Star
Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."
I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.
Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it
The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it
I deal with asbestos stripping companies and I have never ever seen a demolition without the careful removal of asbestos insulation within air regulated enclosures prior to the removal of the building. So the procedure is remove the asbestos and then demolish the building or remove the asbestos and refurbish the building. Smashing it down with nibblers to leave a big pile of asbestos contaminated demolition waste would in our country breach the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and require ALL the construction rubble to be deposited in a (hazardous) asbestos only landfill cell.
So what Bessant has suggested is an absolute crock.
Yeh, but Trump doesn't like woke red tape measures like those.
If his entire family and cabinet die of asbestosis that would be an epic example of karma.
Mesothelioma would be more likely
To be honest I’m not fussy
Asbestosis is rarely fatal
It is always fatal, but one dies of mesothelioma cancer.
Mesothelioma is a different disease. Asbestos exposure is one, but not the only, trigger.
Asbestosis is a chronic lung disease which often but does not always lead to mesothelioma
Indeed.
Sometimes it leads to pneumoconiosis which kills the person instead.
Bottom line is, you get asbestosis, it will lead to complications that kill you in some way usually in 10-15 years (unless you are hit by a car first or something).
Although one friend of a friend died within eight weeks of showing symptoms, but I gather that is rare.
It’s not fatal. There is always the option of a double lung transplant.
interestingly, the survival rates for a double lung transplant aren't enormously higher than the survival rates for asbestosis. Around 30% live ten years after a transplant.
The BBC are utterly obsessed with this sex pest migrant who seems to have been set free very much against his will. No doubt they’ll be reporting shortly on pitchfork wielding vigilantes inspired by their hysteria. Anyone on the darker side of the racist colour chart should avoid carrying a shopping bag decorated with avocados.
It's totally ridiculous.
"The Etheopian"
An Etheopian English teacher decides to migrate to the UK. He arrives in a small boat and is put in a detention centre
Bored he sits on a wall outside the centre and makes small talk with a couple of bored local school girls.
He makes a lewd joke
The police are called
Word gets out and a far right mob mob mobilise and threaten the centre
The man is charged with an attemted grope and is jailed for 12 months
The prison authorities mistakenly release him after two
He asks if he can serve the rest of his sentence as he has no place to go
The prison authorities say no.
They drop him protesting at a local railway station with no money.
All ports and airports are alerted. A dangerous criminal is on the loose
A terrified population lock up their daughters........
What do you think Mr De Milne? Will it fly......
He tried to kiss the 14 year old. Read her testimony.
I notice your the Tory justice secretary has now raised the Ethiopian fugitive to 'Dangerous Paedophile'. Thank goodness his attempted kiss didn't land or he'd have run out of adjectives
He told the girl that he wanted to have sex with her
I know that you think she should be grateful for the attention, but you’re permanently in the wrong un column
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
We do know it came with some rather bizarre design flaws.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
KnightOut overtes his case, which comes down to an unrealistic idea of most voters selecting candidates rather than parties. I was a reasonably successful candidate, turning a safe Tory seat into a Labour marginal, but I was never under any illusions that most voters were weighing up the virtues of the candidates - the difference was due to the minority who did.
Most people vote for a preferred party, and it's reasonable that the result should reflect that.
No it is not. Whatever the voters think they are voting for, they want to be able to dump their MP if they turn out to be worse than expected. Something that is very difficult to do with D'hondt if the MP is liked by the party.
Moreover in the D'hondt system the seat belongs to the party not the candidate. What price rebellion under such circumstances. That may not be a problem for a 'my party right or wrong' MP like yourself but it is something we should be fighting against all the way.
Doesn't work that way in Holyrood. A number of MSPs changed party or went to independent even while on the list. And at least one fought an election thereafter and won (Dennis Canavan of late lamented memory).
Anyone wondering why Britain has fallen behind the world in SMRs may wish to consider the questions asked in the "Great British Nuclear SMR competition".
Bidders are asked to:
‘Tackle workforce inequality across characteristics such as gender, ethnic diversity, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, physical ability and marital status, and achieve 50 per cent gender balance by 2030 for the workforce employed on this TP Contract within the Contractor and its supply chain.’
Total gender parity is required not only within the bidder's own workforce but that of their suppliers.
Not only that:
At one point, the full question asks about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working.
The asylum seeker requirement is straightforwardly impossible.
Even PB's wokiest of wokesters must surely acknowledge that this shit needs to be removed from British public life.
Yeah, we did this earlier in the week and the conclusion was, rightly, it was the Tories fault. Will Sir Drear change it. Don’t put your mortgage on it.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
Red tape long predates 'woke'. This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Yes, and though i don't think all woke complaints are groundless, the overdoing of tickbox process, often due overly vague or overly prescriptive legislation, is likely a tougher and more enduring problem.
It’s about taking any requirements and adding more and more to them to justify their existence. A critical element is that the person adding the extra requirements is completely ignorant of the area being spec’s.
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
Or it will all be made simpler, but in a dumb way, eliminating the actually useful requirements.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
Yes but do we actually know if the Death Star came in on time and under budget?
We do know it came with some rather bizarre design flaws.
Gallego on what the next Democratic president should do about Trump's ballroom: "To really mess with him, just name it the Barack Obama Ballroom, and I think that will take care of half the problem."
I was watching Rick Wilson, and he said on the afternoon of the 20th January (in whatever year the next Dem President is elected) both the Epstein Ballroom and the (Rose) beer garden must be smashed and the debris tipped into the sea to prevent the spoil becoming a Maga shrine. He has even offered to help out destroying the Rose Garden plinth with his jack hammer.
Bessent is on TV right now saying maybe the East Wing had to be destroyed because it had asbestos in it
The ballroom needs to be destroyed because it had Trump in it
I deal with asbestos stripping companies and I have never ever seen a demolition without the careful removal of asbestos insulation within air regulated enclosures prior to the removal of the building. So the procedure is remove the asbestos and then demolish the building or remove the asbestos and refurbish the building. Smashing it down with nibblers to leave a big pile of asbestos contaminated demolition waste would in our country breach the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and require ALL the construction rubble to be deposited in a (hazardous) asbestos only landfill cell.
So what Bessant has suggested is an absolute crock.
Yeh, but Trump doesn't like woke red tape measures like those.
If his entire family and cabinet die of asbestosis that would be an epic example of karma.
Mesothelioma would be more likely
To be honest I’m not fussy
Asbestosis is rarely fatal
It is always fatal, but one dies of mesothelioma cancer.
Mesothelioma is a different disease. Asbestos exposure is one, but not the only, trigger.
Asbestosis is a chronic lung disease which often but does not always lead to mesothelioma
Indeed.
Sometimes it leads to pneumoconiosis which kills the person instead.
Bottom line is, you get asbestosis, it will lead to complications that kill you in some way usually in 10-15 years (unless you are hit by a car first or something).
Although one friend of a friend died within eight weeks of showing symptoms, but I gather that is rare.
It’s not fatal. There is always the option of a double lung transplant.
interestingly, the survival rates for a double lung transplant aren't enormously higher than the survival rates for asbestosis. Around 30% live ten years after a transplant.
Transplants are a tough road. Immune suppression to avoid rejection is not without complications.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
A cool headed administrator who is not an expert can work well in plenty of situations, especially since someone being an expert and a good administrator is probably rare.
But we seem instead almost suspicious of people who do know things. Like the junior civil servant in Yes Minister lamenting he will rise no higher because 'alas, I'm an expert'.
I left to set up my own company over 20 years ago not to make money but to be able to work in an organisation where my engineering capability was respected. My business is now the largest UK owned company in our sector and we employ over 70 staff mostly engineers and microbiologists. The technical competence of decision makers in the UK Government has rapidly declined over the last 20 years. Political antenna used to be important at the top of the Civil Service but this has now spread across the NHS, councils and a myriad of Quangos. At the same time those who have technical expertise are leaving in droves.
This point is completely missed by our politicians who believe that the issue of failure to execute is money. I am now of the belief that money is the worst solution as it prevents the need for reform and strengthens the power of those with political connections.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
The frustrating thing about HS2 was that the case for it was entirely the wrong case. It should always have been about capacity, not speed. And now we are in the video conferencing mode post pandemic shaving a few minutes on selected London to X journeys is even more pointless. But being able to move heavy stuff on electric railways is very much still a good thing.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
Nowhere?
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
KnightOut overtes his case, which comes down to an unrealistic idea of most voters selecting candidates rather than parties. I was a reasonably successful candidate, turning a safe Tory seat into a Labour marginal, but I was never under any illusions that most voters were weighing up the virtues of the candidates - the difference was due to the minority who did.
Most people vote for a preferred party, and it's reasonable that the result should reflect that.
No it is not. Whatever the voters think they are voting for, they want to be able to dump their MP if they turn out to be worse than expected. Something that is very difficult to do with D'hondt if the MP is liked by the party.
Moreover in the D'hondt system the seat belongs to the party not the candidate. What price rebellion under such circumstances. That may not be a problem for a 'my party right or wrong' MP like yourself but it is something we should be fighting against all the way.
Doesn't work that way in Holyrood. A number of MSPs changed party or went to independent even while on the list. And at least one fought an election thereafter and won (Dennis Canavan of late lamented memory).
Dennis is still with us, and still an Indy supporter! I want him as first president of a Scottish republic so he’d better hang on. Unhappily I read the four children from his marriage predeceased him.
Fuck the fuck off. Right off. D'Hondt is possibly the worst electoral system ever devised.
It creates arbitrary cliff-edges and almost always relies on fixed lists that can make it impossible to elect a candidate you like without also electing one you don't like, and the vote for the one you like risks electing the one you don't like but not the one you like!
Awful, awful, horrible manky system! It completely devalues the individual candidate; sacrificed upon the altar of party machine and pisses and shits upon all that is good about politics.
(And it's not even particularly proportional - in the last UK Euro-elections, the LibDems got twice as many votes as the Tories but four times as many seats under D'Hondt.)
I like Milei a lot, but I'd like him even more if he spared the poor Argentinians the abject nonsense of this apology for an electoral system.
STV is better still, but D'Hondt is better than FPTP in a multiparty system, particularly if there is an open Primary to set the order of candidates. I think this is the case in Argentina normally, but not this time for some reason. D'Hondt works best if there are larger constituencies, so more proportional in BA region than the smaller provinces.
KnightOut overtes his case, which comes down to an unrealistic idea of most voters selecting candidates rather than parties. I was a reasonably successful candidate, turning a safe Tory seat into a Labour marginal, but I was never under any illusions that most voters were weighing up the virtues of the candidates - the difference was due to the minority who did.
Most people vote for a preferred party, and it's reasonable that the result should reflect that.
No it is not. Whatever the voters think they are voting for, they want to be able to dump their MP if they turn out to be worse than expected. Something that is very difficult to do with D'hondt if the MP is liked by the party.
Moreover in the D'hondt system the seat belongs to the party not the candidate. What price rebellion under such circumstances. That may not be a problem for a 'my party right or wrong' MP like yourself but it is something we should be fighting against all the way.
Doesn't work that way in Holyrood. A number of MSPs changed party or went to independent even while on the list. And at least one fought an election thereafter and won (Dennis Canavan of late lamented memory).
Dennis is still with us, and still an Indy supporter! I want him as first president of a Scottish republic so he’d better hang on. Unhappily I read the four children from his marriage predeceased him.
Oops, heartfelt apologies. Much missed, certainly.
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.
Don't tell my pension company but I was planning on living forever, actually.
My grandfather was so badly injured aged 20ish in WWI that the hospital nicknamed him the resurrection case. He lived to be about 84 and liked to refer to himself as one of John Bull's bad bargains.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
Since you can’t park in many town centres, due to restricted parking and high charges, this just raises the game. For online shopping.
In my town centre it is 30 or 60 minutes free in the most central Council owned car parks, which seems quite reasonable. That is a good balance between "pop in" and "take up too much time in the short stay". There are longer-stay spots around if required.
60 minutes would barely allow my wife to do a first sweep through one shop.
And then people wonder at the collapse on town shopping.
Or you can have 2 or 3 hours in Asda or Morrisons, or be 500m out and walk for unlimited.
I think that's a good setup - in the denser areas keep them moving.
Really, all a modest levy on out of town would be is a rebalancing, and some of the revenue could be used for town centre improvements or to reduce costs there.
My local shopping out of town centre has a turnover of £200 per day for each of their approx 2250 parking spaces (£150m per annum, around 5m visitors). A levy of of £1 per day is a rounding error, but would raise 800k per annum.
It's an ideal revenue stream - a modest impact, easy to collect, hard to avoid.
Ah yes, the belief that you can “just take some money and no one will notice or be affected”
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
Of course there will be an effect.
Husk off, we are in a position where a period of higher taxes is necessary for a number of years, and there is no credible Plan . All we have are Musk style fantaloons imagining that waving chainsaws around in their bedrooms will make a difference.
That's simply the position inherited by the current Govt in 2024, and I'd say it will take at least a decade for us to crawl out of the shithole where we were left.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
Since you can’t park in many town centres, due to restricted parking and high charges, this just raises the game. For online shopping.
In my town centre it is 30 or 60 minutes free in the most central Council owned car parks, which seems quite reasonable. That is a good balance between "pop in" and "take up too much time in the short stay". There are longer-stay spots around if required.
60 minutes would barely allow my wife to do a first sweep through one shop.
And then people wonder at the collapse on town shopping.
Or you can have 2 or 3 hours in Asda or Morrisons, or be 500m out and walk for unlimited.
I think that's a good setup - in the denser areas keep them moving.
Really, all a modest levy on out of town would be is a rebalancing, and some of the revenue could be used for town centre improvements or to reduce costs there.
My local shopping out of town centre has a turnover of £200 per day for each of their approx 2250 parking spaces (£150m per annum, around 5m visitors). A levy of of £1 per day is a rounding error, but would raise 800k per annum.
It's an ideal revenue stream - a modest impact, easy to collect, hard to avoid.
Ah yes, the belief that you can “just take some money and no one will notice or be affected”
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
Of course there will be an effect.
However, we are in a position where a period of higher taxes is necessary for a number of years, and there is no credible Plan . All we have are Musk style fantaloons imagining that waving chainsaws around in their bedrooms will make a difference.
That's simply the position inherited by the current Govt in 2024, and I'd say it will take at least a decade for us to crawl out of the shithole where we were left.
Yes but you have no justification for taxing efficiently used resources trying to discourage their use.
Your suggestion of taxing people for parking at Aldi is as stupid and asinine as me suggesting:
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
Nowhere?
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Because you can't fill the northern leg without the traffic to the south.
For good or for ill (I'd argue principally for ill) most traffic in England and Wales flows to London. Not Stoke or Birmingham.
And you couldn't put the extra traffic to the south without more tracks.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
Since you can’t park in many town centres, due to restricted parking and high charges, this just raises the game. For online shopping.
In my town centre it is 30 or 60 minutes free in the most central Council owned car parks, which seems quite reasonable. That is a good balance between "pop in" and "take up too much time in the short stay". There are longer-stay spots around if required.
60 minutes would barely allow my wife to do a first sweep through one shop.
And then people wonder at the collapse on town shopping.
Or you can have 2 or 3 hours in Asda or Morrisons, or be 500m out and walk for unlimited.
I think that's a good setup - in the denser areas keep them moving.
Really, all a modest levy on out of town would be is a rebalancing, and some of the revenue could be used for town centre improvements or to reduce costs there.
My local shopping out of town centre has a turnover of £200 per day for each of their approx 2250 parking spaces (£150m per annum, around 5m visitors). A levy of of £1 per day is a rounding error, but would raise 800k per annum.
It's an ideal revenue stream - a modest impact, easy to collect, hard to avoid.
Ah yes, the belief that you can “just take some money and no one will notice or be affected”
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
Of course there will be an effect.
However, we are in a position where a period of higher taxes is necessary for a number of years, and there is no credible Plan . All we have are Musk style fantaloons imagining that waving chainsaws around in their bedrooms will make a difference.
That's simply the position inherited by the current Govt in 2024, and I'd say it will take at least a decade for us to crawl out of the shithole where we were left.
Yes but you have no justification for taxing efficiently used resources trying to discourage their use.
Your suggestion of taxing people for parking at Aldi is as stupid and asinine as me suggesting:
Beats me why the government don't point out that the enormous amount of state spending during Covid, much of which was on supporting job furlough and other measures to keep businesses and orgnisations afloat, actually needs to be paid for
Towards the end of covid there was a bizarre period when people were discussing whether it should be paid for through tax cuts or spending rises.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
Nowhere?
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Because you can't fill the northern leg without the traffic to the south.
For good or for ill (I'd argue principally for ill) most traffic in England and Wales flows to London. Not Stoke or Birmingham.
And you couldn't put the extra traffic to the south without more tracks.
That is not true. Most journeys within the North West remain within the North West, and if it were better connected then there would be even more.
And building the Northern leg first, or concurrently, is not the same as saying never build the London leg, whereas by building the London one first ...
I was eating at a hotel in Greece when, upon learning I was British, the nice Belgian lady next to me immediately asked if i had supported Brexit, despite us not exchanging words until that moment. I thought such things only happened in obviously made up twitter stories.
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
I'm in Italy every few weeks and no one has ever asked me this.
Hence my complete surprise.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
I think that eventually no one would admit to voting for Brexit was a bit of a meme..
A hundred years from now, I doubt we'll be able to find person who would admit to being a Brexit voter.
Don't tell my pension company but I was planning on living forever, actually.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
This is from a friend of mine who uses her cycle to shop. She has a husband and FOUR children. This is Derby. Sometimes they go as a couple with cycles. They have cars but do not usually use them. She works essentially full time (I don't know exact hours). It's generally about the decisions you make and the lifestyle you choose, plus limitations imposed by infra and traffic on practicality and safety.
What we do have is numbers showing that the returns on active travel infra are generally much better than on road projects - partly because of health improvements, partly because the infra is so inexpensive.
(But the equality point is about the ability to make choices - it's particularly important for the 1/3 of pensioners and 40% of disabled adults who do not or cannot have a driving license. Cycling is only one use case amongst many.)
I ride most days, generally utility cycling (making journeys for a purpose other than the journey) but also for leisure.
I ride a Circe Helios e-tandem mostly – either on my own or with one of my children. Yes, you can ride a tandem solo! Technically the tandem belongs to my daughter, who is also Disabled, but everyone likes riding it. It’s our main vehicle for getting around where we live because it’s so much faster and more convenient than other options. We use it for school runs, shopping, getting to clubs – everything within a 5 mile or so radius, really. We’re in a city, so that’s pretty much everything. The brilliant Brian from Remap even made a mount for the rear pannier rack, which carries my wheelchair. If I’m only expecting to walk really short distances from cycle parking, my foldable crutches also fit into a bike pannier. I need e-assist on any cycle I use, as otherwise I can only ride downhill…
Beats me why the government don't point out that the enormous amount of state spending during Covid, much of which was on supporting job furlough and other measures to keep businesses and orgnisations afloat, actually needs to be paid for
And ruin any chance of re-election?
Our politicians are weak, but we the public don't like hard truths.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
Since you can’t park in many town centres, due to restricted parking and high charges, this just raises the game. For online shopping.
In my town centre it is 30 or 60 minutes free in the most central Council owned car parks, which seems quite reasonable. That is a good balance between "pop in" and "take up too much time in the short stay". There are longer-stay spots around if required.
60 minutes would barely allow my wife to do a first sweep through one shop.
And then people wonder at the collapse on town shopping.
Or you can have 2 or 3 hours in Asda or Morrisons, or be 500m out and walk for unlimited.
I think that's a good setup - in the denser areas keep them moving.
Really, all a modest levy on out of town would be is a rebalancing, and some of the revenue could be used for town centre improvements or to reduce costs there.
My local shopping out of town centre has a turnover of £200 per day for each of their approx 2250 parking spaces (£150m per annum, around 5m visitors). A levy of of £1 per day is a rounding error, but would raise 800k per annum.
It's an ideal revenue stream - a modest impact, easy to collect, hard to avoid.
Ah yes, the belief that you can “just take some money and no one will notice or be affected”
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
Of course there will be an effect.
However, we are in a position where a period of higher taxes is necessary for a number of years, and there is no credible Plan . All we have are Musk style fantaloons imagining that waving chainsaws around in their bedrooms will make a difference.
That's simply the position inherited by the current Govt in 2024, and I'd say it will take at least a decade for us to crawl out of the shithole where we were left.
Yes but you have no justification for taxing efficiently used resources trying to discourage their use.
Your suggestion of taxing people for parking at Aldi is as stupid and asinine as me suggesting:
£10 a journey tax on anyone who rides a bike.
£20 if they are not wearing a helmet.
I said nothing about charging the customer - that would be a matter for the provider.
You do seem to be a touch monomaniacal about Private Motor Vehicles as being the only form of "private transport". They are not.
And there exists a legal duty for public sector bodies to provide equal access to services in their investment schemes. That includes to people who cannot have a driving licence.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
There's no proposal there to tax an individual. It's merely an obvious way to raise some revenue for local Government or national government, with all kinds of opportunities to chance some balances between out of town / town centres and so on.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
This is from a friend of mine who uses her cycle to shop. She has a husband and FOUR children. This is Derby. Sometimes they go as a couple with cycles. They have cars but do not usually use them. She works essentially full time (I don't know exact hours). It's generally about the decisions you make and the lifestyle you choose, plus limitations imposed by infra and traffic on practicality and safety.
What we do have is numbers showing that the returns on active travel infra are generally much better than on road projects - partly because of health improvements, partly because the infra is so inexpensive.
(But the equality point is about the ability to make choices - it's particularly important for the 1/3 of pensioners and 40% of disabled adults who do not or cannot have a driving license. Cycling is only one use case amongst many.)
I ride most days, generally utility cycling (making journeys for a purpose other than the journey) but also for leisure.
I ride a Circe Helios e-tandem mostly – either on my own or with one of my children. Yes, you can ride a tandem solo! Technically the tandem belongs to my daughter, who is also Disabled, but everyone likes riding it. It’s our main vehicle for getting around where we live because it’s so much faster and more convenient than other options. We use it for school runs, shopping, getting to clubs – everything within a 5 mile or so radius, really. We’re in a city, so that’s pretty much everything. The brilliant Brian from Remap even made a mount for the rear pannier rack, which carries my wheelchair. If I’m only expecting to walk really short distances from cycle parking, my foldable crutches also fit into a bike pannier. I need e-assist on any cycle I use, as otherwise I can only ride downhill…
And 40% of households in northern cities like Liverpool.
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
There's no proposal ther to tax an individual. It's merely an obvious way to raise some revenue for local Government or national government, with all kinds of opportunities to chance some balances between out of town / town centres and so on.
You said to tax the space, what did you mean if not to tax the individual using it?
If you meant the land, that's already taxed. Car parks are taxed via NNDR already. 🤦♂️
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
A cool headed administrator who is not an expert can work well in plenty of situations, especially since someone being an expert and a good administrator is probably rare.
But we seem instead almost suspicious of people who do know things. Like the junior civil servant in Yes Minister lamenting he will rise no higher because 'alas, I'm an expert'.
I left to set up my own company over 20 years ago not to make money but to be able to work in an organisation where my engineering capability was respected. My business is now the largest UK owned company in our sector and we employ over 70 staff mostly engineers and microbiologists. The technical competence of decision makers in the UK Government has rapidly declined over the last 20 years. Political antenna used to be important at the top of the Civil Service but this has now spread across the NHS, councils and a myriad of Quangos. At the same time those who have technical expertise are leaving in droves.
This point is completely missed by our politicians who believe that the issue of failure to execute is money. I am now of the belief that money is the worst solution as it prevents the need for reform and strengthens the power of those with political connections.
I think that government should collapse to those competencies for which they are held politically accountable (eg the railways) and the rest should be privatised or devolved to local authorities/devolved governments (eg education). Given your obvious experience and expertise, would this be a good idea or bad?
Beats me why the government don't point out that the enormous amount of state spending during Covid, much of which was on supporting job furlough and other measures to keep businesses and orgnisations afloat, actually needs to be paid for
And ruin any chance of re-election?
Our politicians are weak, but we the public don't like hard truths.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
Nowhere?
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Because you can't fill the northern leg without the traffic to the south.
For good or for ill (I'd argue principally for ill) most traffic in England and Wales flows to London. Not Stoke or Birmingham.
And you couldn't put the extra traffic to the south without more tracks.
That is not true. Most journeys within the North West remain within the North West, and if it were better connected then there would be even more.
And building the Northern leg first, or concurrently, is not the same as saying never build the London leg, whereas by building the London one first ...
Yes, poor connections in the north are just taken as a given.
Someone recently noted that Sheffield and Manchester are the two largest near neighbour cities in Europe without either decent road or rail connections.
Meanwhile, we're building a new line between Cambridge and Oxford.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
That sounds depressingly familiar. It's always been a problem in the UK that people who make decisions all to often have scant knowledge if the subject matter, there seems to be a bizarre culture of putting unknowledgable managers and administrators in these positions rather than someone who actually knows what's what.
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
A cool headed administrator who is not an expert can work well in plenty of situations, especially since someone being an expert and a good administrator is probably rare.
But we seem instead almost suspicious of people who do know things. Like the junior civil servant in Yes Minister lamenting he will rise no higher because 'alas, I'm an expert'.
I left to set up my own company over 20 years ago not to make money but to be able to work in an organisation where my engineering capability was respected. My business is now the largest UK owned company in our sector and we employ over 70 staff mostly engineers and microbiologists. The technical competence of decision makers in the UK Government has rapidly declined over the last 20 years. Political antenna used to be important at the top of the Civil Service but this has now spread across the NHS, councils and a myriad of Quangos. At the same time those who have technical expertise are leaving in droves.
This point is completely missed by our politicians who believe that the issue of failure to execute is money. I am now of the belief that money is the worst solution as it prevents the need for reform and strengthens the power of those with political connections.
That's a very interesting comment. Any chance of expanding on that, and perhaps working it into a header ?
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
There's no proposal ther to tax an individual. It's merely an obvious way to raise some revenue for local Government or national government, with all kinds of opportunities to chance some balances between out of town / town centres and so on.
You said to tax the space, what did you mean if not to tax the individual using it?
If you meant the land, that's already taxed. Car parks are taxed via NNDR already. 🤦♂️
An adjustment of business rates; if you want a comparison consider the success of the workplace parking levy in Nottingham.
Given the amount of countryside being concreted over, it would be a social good to incentivise efficiency. And appropriate provision of alternatives would reduce pressure on parking by incentivising alternatives.
Was this really the limit of Sunak's ambition ? Why did he even bother.
Rishi Sunak to the Times: "Clearly, I miss the levers of power. I’m proud I brought in the smoking ban for the young. I miss playing cricket in the garden with the England cricket team and the staff. But not much else." https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1982114041196609600
It was a nice interview piece but I thought that too about that bit. I'd have thought he'd be proud of steadying the ship after Truss pointed it at the rocks.
I suspect history will turn out to look more favourably on Sunak than it will on Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Sunak screwed up HS2 which is going to have long term economic impact.
I suspect he won't be looked as favourably as Brown, Blair or Major..
To be fair to Sunak (and I was angry with him too) it was Johnson and Shapps that doomed HS2 by scrapping the north eastern leg to Leeds and HS3 from Newcastle to Liverpool, without which HS2 couldn't function.
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
Cute that you think there was ever a snowball's chance in hell of the northern leg actually getting built.
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
Sigh.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
Nowhere?
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Because you can't fill the northern leg without the traffic to the south.
For good or for ill (I'd argue principally for ill) most traffic in England and Wales flows to London. Not Stoke or Birmingham.
And you couldn't put the extra traffic to the south without more tracks.
That is not true. Most journeys within the North West remain within the North West, and if it were better connected then there would be even more.
And building the Northern leg first, or concurrently, is not the same as saying never build the London leg, whereas by building the London one first ...
Yes, poor connections in the north are just taken as a given.
Someone recently noted that Sheffield and Manchester are the two largest near neighbour cities in Europe without either decent road or rail connections.
Meanwhile, we're building a new line between Cambridge and Oxford.
I wouldn’t call the current approach to the Cambridge to Oxford line as well planned
The Government is also considering raising the top rate of income tax, with the additional rate possibly rising from 45p in the £ back to 50p as it was when Brown left office in 2010 or the threshold for the additional rate being reduced to £110k
How do they intend to value houses to determine which are worth more than £2m?
My Dad bought a substantial house in London with his second wife in 1997 for £325k. The house next door sold for £1.88m in 2022, so my Dad's house could be worth £2m (but it probably isn't because it's not in as good internal condition, though that might not matter, depending on the method of valuation).
I reckon a £20k pa tax would actually cause him to seriously consider downsizing.
The proposal is a tax on the proportion of value above £2m, not the entire value.
That sounds like a now-classical Rachel Reeves de-minimus failure of making almost zero difference, whilst causing as much political self-damage as possible.
The Treasury Civil Servant said: "Bend Over, Bend Over", so RR Bent Over and ...
It would be far easier to roll it into a flat % of Value Council Tax, pump a little bit less extra money in to Councils from central funds, and make a move to restoring Stamp Duty to a lower level (say a reduction by 25-50%).
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
What possible justification is there to do that?
Your hatred of private transport seeths through yet again.
It is up to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres to determine how their land is efficiently used, people paying to be there all day rather than having a lot of turnover is probably NOT efficient.
Not really; it's a fairly modest proposal.
I love private transport, but I prefer to prioritise scarce resources for efficient users, and to give some weight to equality.
But the reason the town centres are dying, is because the councils are restricting and charging for parking. To put it bluntly they see cars as a revenue source, especially cars from out of town. So the car owners from out of town go elsewhere, or order from Amazon.
No, a new cycle lane won’t make me take the bike to do my week’s shopping.
Secure cycle parking might encourage people to use the cinema though.
I do my week's shopping on my bike, FYI. So do lots of people in areas with good cycle infrastructure. I pick up stuff like milk and eggs by walking round to the corner shop.
I am assuming (forgive me if I am wrong) that you are not shopping for a family of 4.
Nor are most people. Average household size in the UK is 2.4. I'm just going to get a cargo bike when that time comes, or else pop into Morrisons on the way back from work twice a week rather than once.
You claimed to be in favour of 'equality' yet now claim only that 'most people' matter.
Families of 4 are people too and need equality too.
I do the weekly shop for my family of 4 every Sunday at the out of town supermarket. I get a list of food that my wife and 2 kids want for the week ahead (eldest sometimes comes with me) and pick it all up in one go, that takes about an hour and a half, and only 1 journey for all 4 of us for an entire week. Taking no space at all in town.
That's extremely efficient.
What absolute nutjob suggested fining people going to Aldi to get food.
If a bit more is required, then put a 50p a day levy on supermarket and out of town centre car parking spaces, to incentivise their efficient use, increasing to £1 next year. That's perhaps £1-3 billion of low-hanging fruit, and would tip the balance towards town centres. There's a defensible case to hypothecate such finds to active travel and accessible public transport, as that would over time reduce the need for such spaces.
There's no proposal ther to tax an individual. It's merely an obvious way to raise some revenue for local Government or national government, with all kinds of opportunities to chance some balances between out of town / town centres and so on.
You said to tax the space, what did you mean if not to tax the individual using it?
If you meant the land, that's already taxed. Car parks are taxed via NNDR already. 🤦♂️
An adjustment of business rates; if you want a comparison consider the success of the workplace parking levy in Nottingham.
Given the amount of countryside being concreted over, it would be a social good to incentivise efficiency. And appropriate provision of alternatives would reduce pressure on parking by incentivising alternatives.
Nottingham is a city, not out of town.
Efficiency is already incentivised and out of town parking is extremely efficient, yet you want to disincentivise efficient use of land.
Comments
I’ll just chuck some cattle grids on some footpaths. No-one will notice, eh?
With the requirements inequality questions based on a 2012 law - again when the Tories were in power.
Now the requirements aren't great but Labour really isn't at fault her although once again you are trying to hint that they are the proble,..
AV (which most rejected) would be a good move, but no further. It would enable newcomers to build up support over time.
It is likely that the great majority of the English seats in the next General Election will in fact be two party contests, mostly Reform v Labour and Reform v LDs. The way the two party FPTP system can eat up the Tories leaving barely a trace is extraordinary. Labour's best chance is that it is very doubtful that this can happen to two parties at once.
Betting post: A certain degree of Labour recovery, if I am correct, is built into the fabric of current political reality. DYOR.
In fact, as others have pointed out, some of them are illegal.
The asylum seekers thing is an American import - in America, under Biden, they were trying to get Federal Contractors to hire, equally, asylum seekers. Which led to a couple of comic lawsuits - the contractors pointed out that under security legislation they couldn’t employ asylum seekers on secret projects, under threat of massive fines and imprisonment. The issue being the elaborate background checks required.
So someone saw this on TikTok and thought it was awesome.
I worked for a few companies that bid for public contracts. It was very time consuming and, consequently, alot of cost to bear when the work isn’t guaranteed.
If bidding stays this onerous why bother bidding ?
The Integrated Rail Plan was a deliberate forgery, as it was undeliverable, and unless he is as stupid as he comes across (which seems improbable) Shapps knew that when he presented it to the Commons. Sunak was left to clear up the mess, which he did badly.
Where he absolutely screwed up and can't be excused was in the highly illegal fire sale of the land that had been purchased to ensure that nobody else could ever build it - a move so dumb even Cummings would have blinked at it.
Edited for a muddle on the alphabet soup.
This is just more of the same problem that's afflicted government since forever.
Moreover in the D'hondt system the seat belongs to the party not the candidate. What price rebellion under such circumstances. That may not be a problem for a 'my party right or wrong' MP like yourself but it is something we should be fighting against all the way.
Poor old 'practicality' has become a bit lost.
A uni friend ended up working in California in the defence industry. His company made an interesting box of electronic tricks that was several orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional approach.
US military saw it, loved it, spec’s it. Bought it.
A couple of blokes from upside down land turned up and looked at it. After drinking most of the beer in the local bars, they wrote a recommendation and an order followed,
Other US allies did similar.
The U.K. delegation was a huge collection of hangers on. They went away and sent back a vast document for all the changes they wanted. According to my friend, they ranged from the idiotic to the harmful. Many were obviously from people who had no clue about electronics or the function of the box of tricks.
After discussion with his bosses, they decided not to go forward with the suggested contract. Too much work, risk of overruns in cost, creating a bad product, a scandal and a failure.
Their contact in London was startled - couldn’t believe that people would turn their nose up at the money.
Asbestosis is a chronic lung disease which often but does not always lead to mesothelioma
Maybe all those Albanian taxi driver 'testimonials' weren't bullsh*t after all?
But when you consider not only how many people never get to be PM, and how nobody from a clearly defined ethnic minority (leaving aside, for the moment, the complicated question of Boris Johnson and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool's ancestries) had done so before, he did achieve far beyond what most people with an interest in politics could hope to have done.
But there were no local independents or novelty parties (mrlp etc)
But what comes over loud and clear is that he really had no ambitions for achieving anything as PM. Just another box ticked.
There will be (and have been) worse PMs, of course.
Obviously.
Sometimes it leads to pneumoconiosis which kills the person instead.
Bottom line is, you get asbestosis, it will lead to complications that kill you in some way usually in 10-15 years (unless you are hit by a car first or something).
Although one friend of a friend died within eight weeks of showing symptoms, but I gather that is rare.
More here:
https://www.asbestos.com/asbestosis/
See the comedy of a single switch in the TSR2 cockpit.
On the upside, if a Reform government tries to build concentration camps for the Muslims, the spec will be 136,577 pages, take ten years to create and make building the camps physically impossible.
So there’s that.
As i like to note it used to take decades in Parliament to become PM, now you probably need to be a front bencher in about 5 years. Were he not content to phone it in Sunak might have concluded his political career inside 10 years.
Edit: That sort if thing is also why we need fantasy/sci-fi villains to run things for us - sure they are evil, but they usually demonstrate impressive logistical and project management skilks.
Palpatine and Sauron could teach us many things.
(Although an Indonesian asked me today if I needed a visa to visit Italy now).
Years ago I worked for an IT organisation that landed a contract with a UK government department - three months of dealing with civil servants, who knew with implacable confidence that someone with 20 years experience in the field was less capable than themselves, and I walked out and vowed never to deal with that kind of idiot again if remotely possible.
(The possibility we'll start making things less onerous instead i discount with a mocking laugh)
Türkiye’s Eurofighter Typhoon strategy is much bigger than most realize.
Based on reporting by @anilsahinst & @SavunmaSanayiST , the plan is multi-layered and moves fast:
1️⃣ New Tranche 4 Order – UK
• Türkiye is negotiating for 40 Tranche 4 Typhoons (20 firm + 20 optional)
• First batch: 20 aircraft
• Second batch: 20 depending on operational needs
• A high-level UK delegation is expected in Ankara soon — potentially for the signing.
2️⃣ Qatar Deal (Tranche 3A)
• 12 aircraft with AESA radar.
• Critical to establish training and logistics infrastructure early.
• Türkiye may take over Qatar’s production slot, accelerating deliveries by up to 2 years.
3️⃣ Oman Talks (Tranche 3A)
• Negotiations ongoing for up to 12 aircraft.
• Full or partial fleet transfer possible, bridging the timeline before Tranche 4 jets arrive.
https://x.com/er_tugay_/status/1982451416879783999
But we seem instead almost suspicious of people who do know things. Like the junior civil servant in Yes Minister lamenting he will rise no higher because 'alas, I'm an expert'.
I tried to swerve the question but they seemed insistent so i took the coward's way out and just implied I'd been against ftom the start and chuckled appreciatively at a joke about angry Brits and passport lines.
https://www.pse.com/
(I don't have any big complaints. The power here went off after I went to sleep, and came back on a little before 8 AM. I woke up earlier, and spent much of the time before 8 reading with a flashlight in bed. Which wasn't as much fun as it was when I was breaking my parents' rules.)
I am not making this up.
A highly educated friend of mine claimed throughout the Brexit process that we would soon need a different visa for each country in the EU. I tried to explain that this is not how Schenghen works, but he wouldn't have it.
He did so to a closed audience who had themselves also travelled to Manchester, with uninvited Mancs very much kept out by security barriers.
#InsideJob
Still, with this one it's baby steps.
I know that you think she should be grateful for the attention, but you’re permanently in the wrong un column
It was doomed years ago, the writing was on the wall the second it was agreed to begin construction in the South and only start investing in the North once the London leg was complete.
The only chance there would have been for the northern leg of HS2 is for them to either be built concurrently or to do the northern leg first and the London one last.
Once the London leg was past the point of no return, the Treasury no longer had a reason to keep up the pretence of investing in the North.
Sunak just said the quiet part out loud.
It was not possible to build the northern leg first because without the southern leg, there would have been nowhere for the trains to actually go to. The northern section of the WCML is congested but the southern was ram packed.
I agree the Treasury are either crooks or morons, and I would like to see them relocated to Darlington or Carlisle at which point I think thing ps would radically alter. But engineering reasons made your proposed solution impossible.
I left to set up my own company over 20 years ago not to make money but to be able to work in an organisation where my engineering capability was respected. My business is now the largest UK owned company in our sector and we employ over 70 staff mostly engineers and microbiologists. The technical competence of decision makers in the UK Government has rapidly declined over the last 20 years. Political antenna used to be important at the top of the Civil Service but this has now spread across the NHS, councils and a myriad of Quangos. At the same time those who have technical expertise are leaving in droves.
This point is completely missed by our politicians who believe that the issue of failure to execute is money. I am now of the belief that money is the worst solution as it prevents the need for reform and strengthens the power of those with political connections.
So you couldn't have trains going between say Preston, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and Birmingham without the southern leg? Why on earth not?
The idea that London is the only place that isn't nowhere is precisely why the northern leg was doomed from the start.
Unhappily I read the four children from his marriage predeceased him.
Husk off, we are in a position where a period of higher taxes is necessary for a number of years, and there is no credible Plan . All we have are Musk style fantaloons imagining that waving chainsaws around in their bedrooms will make a difference.
That's simply the position inherited by the current Govt in 2024, and I'd say it will take at least a decade for us to crawl out of the shithole where we were left.
Your suggestion of taxing people for parking at Aldi is as stupid and asinine as me suggesting:
£10 a journey tax on anyone who rides a bike.
£20 if they are not wearing a helmet.
For good or for ill (I'd argue principally for ill) most traffic in England and Wales flows to London. Not Stoke or Birmingham.
And you couldn't put the extra traffic to the south without more tracks.
And building the Northern leg first, or concurrently, is not the same as saying never build the London leg, whereas by building the London one first ...
Only if it's Mr Slant.
What we do have is numbers showing that the returns on active travel infra are generally much better than on road projects - partly because of health improvements, partly because the infra is so inexpensive.
(But the equality point is about the ability to make choices - it's particularly important for the 1/3 of pensioners and 40% of disabled adults who do not or cannot have a driving license. Cycling is only one use case amongst many.)
I ride most days, generally utility cycling (making journeys for a purpose other than the journey) but also for leisure.
I ride a Circe Helios e-tandem mostly – either on my own or with one of my children. Yes, you can ride a tandem solo! Technically the tandem belongs to my daughter, who is also Disabled, but everyone likes riding it. It’s our main vehicle for getting around where we live because it’s so much faster and more convenient than other options. We use it for school runs, shopping, getting to clubs – everything within a 5 mile or so radius, really. We’re in a city, so that’s pretty much everything. The brilliant Brian from Remap even made a mount for the rear pannier rack, which carries my wheelchair. If I’m only expecting to walk really short distances from cycle parking, my foldable crutches also fit into a bike pannier. I need e-assist on any cycle I use, as otherwise I can only ride downhill…
Our politicians are weak, but we the public don't like hard truths.
You do seem to be a touch monomaniacal about Private Motor Vehicles as being the only form of "private transport". They are not.
And there exists a legal duty for public sector bodies to provide equal access to services in their investment schemes. That includes to people who cannot have a driving licence.
If you meant the land, that's already taxed. Car parks are taxed via NNDR already. 🤦♂️
Someone recently noted that Sheffield and Manchester are the two largest near neighbour cities in Europe without either decent road or rail connections.
Meanwhile, we're building a new line between Cambridge and Oxford.
Any chance of expanding on that, and perhaps working it into a header ?
Given the amount of countryside being concreted over, it would be a social good to incentivise efficiency. And appropriate provision of alternatives would reduce pressure on parking by incentivising alternatives.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1982544010054164961/photo/1
Efficiency is already incentivised and out of town parking is extremely efficient, yet you want to disincentivise efficient use of land.