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.
Yes. I've recently been in a few meetings where people felt the need to query/dispute/complicate things to justify their existence.
At least on a teams call you can roll your eyes and swear (as long as your muted and don't have a camera on).
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.
Yes. I've recently been in a few meetings where people felt the need to query/dispute/complicate things to justify their existence.
Its weird to have the opposite problem and people come to you perhaps expecting a complication and you don't oblige.
So often i end up responding to people with a variation of "I don't know man, it's probably fine and you probably didn't need to ask me".
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
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.
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.
An immortal lawyer ? *Shudders*
Only if it's Mr Slant.
There has only ever been one lawyer since the dawn of time. They can appear anywhere, shape-shift.
It's wonder they're not even more expensive.... ;-)
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.
One of the beauties of STV is the ability of voters to choose between multiple candidates standing for a party. So this means that where you have a party standing by a complete rogue who is one of their MPs, it's much easier for the voters to get rid of them.
This aspect is one reason in favour of larger STV constituencies - say 6 MPs per constituency - because parties will be more likely to stand multiple candidates.
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.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing on steroids.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
The train managers/inspectors/revenue protection officers were fine with me whenever I split ticketed.
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
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
I do split tickets all the time.
Both tomorrow and Wednesday I will be sat in First class with split tickets and a Seatfrog upgrade - the only question they will ask is how much the upgrade was this time and sorry that the gin is still in a can
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
I do split tickets all the time.
Both tomorrow and Wednesday I will be sat in First class with split tickets and a Seatfrog upgrade - the only question they will ask is how much the upgrade was this time and sorry that the gin is still in a can
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
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
I do split tickets all the time.
Both tomorrow and Wednesday I will be sat in First class with split tickets and a Seatfrog upgrade - the only question they will ask is how much the upgrade was this time and sorry that the gin is still in a can
I've found Seatfrog utterly useless.
Bid a decent amount and don’t take trains between 19:00 and 19:29
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
The joys of split ticketing.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
But at least they were different trains. Doing split ticketing *on the same train* was dodgy. I never did quite get my head around whether it would get one turfed off or charged extra.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
Split ticketing is fine as long as the train stops at the station in question. There is now an app called TrainSplit that will do it for you - and is produced by the train companies
Thought that was fuck the Stewarts, and i was thinking that was centuries too late.
And tbf they were pretty fucked at the time: one regicide, banishments, chased round the highlands as a criminal, descent into alcoholic obscurity. An interesting alternative history is what would the Hanoverians have done with Charles Edward Stuart if they’d caught him, they were pretty savage with everyone else.
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
Roger Wrongun has quite the ring to it
Is @Roger still defending a convicted child sex offender?
Shame on him and what about the child, the family, and others traumatised by this incident
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
My hypocrimometer just made a strange smashing noise.
Thought that was fuck the Stewarts, and i was thinking that was centuries too late.
And tbf they were pretty fucked at the time: one regicide, banishments, chased round the highlands as a criminal, descent into alcoholic obscurity. An interesting alternative history is what would the Hanoverians have done with Charles Edward Stuart if they’d caught him, they were pretty savage with everyone else.
They’d have shade him sing the Skye Boat Song in an ironic manner.
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
Roger Wrongun has quite the ring to it
Sounds like a Viz character. Roger Wrongun the Europhile Paedophile.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
Glasgow to Sheffield is Cross Country. They are the fare setter. They set high fares to discourage too many people from travelling on their inadequately short trains.
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
The Wcml is at capacity - you want to replace the route from Manchester to a London and then use the current WCML for slower stopping services.
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
Thought that was fuck the Stewarts, and i was thinking that was centuries too late.
And tbf they were pretty fucked at the time: one regicide, banishments, chased round the highlands as a criminal, descent into alcoholic obscurity. An interesting alternative history is what would the Hanoverians have done with Charles Edward Stuart if they’d caught him, they were pretty savage with everyone else.
They’d have shade him sing the Skye Boat Song in an ironic manner.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
Glasgow to Sheffield is Cross Country. They are the fare setter. They set high fares to discourage too many people from travelling on their inadequately short trains.
Exactly this - most U.K. train services are priced to discourage use and yet many lines are at historically high passenger levels albeit for leisure an no longer commuting
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
Funny given just about the only person who continually harps on about Brexit from either side is... you. The rest of us have moved on.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
Glasgow to Sheffield is Cross Country. They are the fare setter. They set high fares to discourage too many people from travelling on their inadequately short trains.
Exactly this - most U.K. train services are priced to discourage use and yet many lines are at historically high passenger levels albeit for leisure an no longer commuting
I once did the Penzance to Aberdeen train.
I didn't bother about split ticketing as work were paying for it.
Whilst in Malaysia Trump seems to have found time to tweet that childhood vaccines are a disaster unless you split them in weird ways and paracetamol is very very bad.
Bonkers.
Mad as a box of frogs.
And yet 40% of US voters - give or take - still support.
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
Funny given just about the only person who continually harps on about Brexit from either side is... you. The rest of us have moved on.
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).
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…
That bike retails at £4700. That's more than I would pay for a car.
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
The Wcml is at capacity - you want to replace the route from Manchester to a London and then use the current WCML for slower stopping services.
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
There is unused capacity on the ECML. Paths being squandered on 5 coach trains when they could be used by 9 or 10 car. And there's going to be more of this from December.
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
Funny given just about the only person who continually harps on about Brexit from either side is... you. The rest of us have moved on.
I am not the one that mentioned it
You are the one hapring on about it and trying to make a political point out of someone's holiday anecdote. You are also the one who never misses an opportuity to harp on about it. Brexit is living rent free in your head.
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…
That bike retails at £4700. That's more than I would pay for a car.
That's more than twice I recently paid for an Audi A6 Allroad for the Devon lanes. No point in paying more.
Whilst in Malaysia Trump seems to have found time to tweet that childhood vaccines are a disaster unless you split them in weird ways and paracetamol is very very bad.
Bonkers.
Mad as a box of frogs.
And yet 40% of US voters - give or take - still support.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
Quite obviously most people vote for the party, not the individual. How else do we have "safe seats"?
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
Funny given just about the only person who continually harps on about Brexit from either side is... you. The rest of us have moved on.
I am not the one that mentioned it
You are the one hapring on about it and trying to make a political point out of someone's holiday anecdote. You are also the one who never misses an opportuity to harp on about it. Brexit is living rent free in your head.
Brexit continues to make life worse than it used to be on a daily basis, but it seems I am living rent free in your head
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
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.
At least one poster (actually several) who definitely voted for Brexit will have their consciousness uploaded to AI, and will still be posting about it. Constantly.
Funny given just about the only person who continually harps on about Brexit from either side is... you. The rest of us have moved on.
I am not the one that mentioned it
You are the one hapring on about it and trying to make a political point out of someone's holiday anecdote. You are also the one who never misses an opportuity to harp on about it. Brexit is living rent free in your head.
Brexit continues to make life worse than it used to be on a daily basis, but it seems I am living rent free in your head
I dont know anything about you other than you seem to think and talk about Brexit every day of your life.
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
No it isn't. In FPTP the electorate chooses who they elect. In D'hondt that choice is made by the parties.
But the point is that, as I have said many times on here before, we should be reducing - breaking would be preferable - the power of the parties not increasing it. The way you do this is through reform in Parliament. Reduce the ability of parties to blackmail or bribe the MPs to vote along party lines. Start by making every vote a free vote. The Government wins by force of argument and persuasion not by threat. D'hondt and any other system that assigns the seat by party increases the power of parties, not reduces it.
Whilst in Malaysia Trump seems to have found time to tweet that childhood vaccines are a disaster unless you split them in weird ways and paracetamol is very very bad.
Bonkers.
Mad as a box of frogs.
And yet 40% of US voters - give or take - still support.
And Reform UK are aping him all the way.
Brexit and Reform is our version of Peronism.
Trump has far more in common with Peron than Milei too.
The Jack Smith trial should be interesting. If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly. https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
Glasgow to Sheffield is Cross Country. They are the fare setter. They set high fares to discourage too many people from travelling on their inadequately short trains.
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
No it isn't. In FPTP the electorate chooses who they elect. In D'hondt that choice is made by the parties.
But the point is that, as I have said many times on here before, we should be reducing - breaking would be preferable - the power of the parties not increasing it. The way you do this is through reform in Parliament. Reduce the ability of parties to blackmail or bribe the MPs to vote along party lines. Start by making every vote a free vote. The Government wins by force of argument and persuasion not by threat. D'hondt and any other system that assigns the seat by party increases the power of parties, not reduces it.
STV in multi-member constituencies is better at that.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Don't be a low IQ moron.
You're not a doctor, I know plenty who exasperated by Trump and RFK Jr.
I have also praised Trump on this thread for his initial approach to the vaccine.
Trump's comments today will be seen even more damaging then when he suggested drinking bleach to combat Covid.
The Jack Smith trial should be interesting. If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly. https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
He wants to testify in public . But the GOP could stop that .
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Don't be a low IQ moron.
You're not a doctor, I know plenty who exasperated by Trump and RFK Jr.
I have also praised Trump on this thread for his initial approach to the vaccine.
Trump's comments today will be seen even more damaging then when he suggested drinking bleach to combat Covid.
By a mile the most damaging thing for vaccine adherence this century has been the bungled roll out of the Covid vaccine.
The Jack Smith trial should be interesting. If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly. https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
He wants to testify in public . But the GOP could stop that .
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
No it isn't. In FPTP the electorate chooses who they elect. In D'hondt that choice is made by the parties.
But the point is that, as I have said many times on here before, we should be reducing - breaking would be preferable - the power of the parties not increasing it. The way you do this is through reform in Parliament. Reduce the ability of parties to blackmail or bribe the MPs to vote along party lines. Start by making every vote a free vote. The Government wins by force of argument and persuasion not by threat. D'hondt and any other system that assigns the seat by party increases the power of parties, not reduces it.
STV in multi-member constituencies is better at that.
As I said I prefer AV but could live with STV. As long as the parties have now place in it. We should not formalise voting for parties.
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
The Wcml is at capacity - you want to replace the route from Manchester to a London and then use the current WCML for slower stopping services.
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
There is unused capacity on the ECML. Paths being squandered on 5 coach trains when they could be used by 9 or 10 car. And there's going to be more of this from December.
The only 5 coach trains are the private operators who should be banned - but they are running a profitable service for reasons I won’t cover as it would be libel
Timothy Mellon, who donated $130 million to help pay the $9 billion monthly cost to cover military salaries, is currently in litigation over his financial connections to the Epstein Sex Trafficking Ring.
The Jack Smith trial should be interesting. If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly. https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
He wants to testify in public . But the GOP could stop that .
How ?
He’s due to appear before Congress . But the GOP have the majority on the relevant committee so could block him from testifying in front of the cameras .
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
The Wcml is at capacity - you want to replace the route from Manchester to a London and then use the current WCML for slower stopping services.
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
There is unused capacity on the ECML. Paths being squandered on 5 coach trains when they could be used by 9 or 10 car. And there's going to be more of this from December.
The only 5 coach trains are the private operators who should be banned - but they are running a profitable service for reasons I won’t cover as it would be libel
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
And in many (most?) cases the winner is a foregone conclusion. Even in the exceptional circumstances of the last election, and with a candidate who had had some, shall we say, personal difficulties, the blue rosette trumped any other considerations in determining the outcome. Had I wanted to vote for the party, but against the man in first position on the list, my dilemma would have been exactly the same as for the theoretical d'Hondt voter above.
At least in the case of the theoretical d'Hondt voter, it is possible to cast a vote that may influence who else might be elected in additional to the candidate you don't want. No chance of that where I am. Idiot in the Blue Rosette wins every time, and nobody else has a chance.
(I suspect next time, if nothing changes in between, it will be the Idiot in the Light Blue Rosette)
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).
The exception rather than the rule.
FPTP is just a closed list d’Hondt election with the constituency only electing one legislator.
No it isn't. In FPTP the electorate chooses who they elect. In D'hondt that choice is made by the parties.
But the point is that, as I have said many times on here before, we should be reducing - breaking would be preferable - the power of the parties not increasing it. The way you do this is through reform in Parliament. Reduce the ability of parties to blackmail or bribe the MPs to vote along party lines. Start by making every vote a free vote. The Government wins by force of argument and persuasion not by threat. D'hondt and any other system that assigns the seat by party increases the power of parties, not reduces it.
Who picks who the Conservative Party candidate is going to be under FPTP? Why, it’s the Conservative Party. Who picks the Labour candidate. The Labour Party. Parties pick candidates under FPTP. You need some sort of ordinal system to break the parties control over that, like STV (bigger constituencies helping), an open list system or maybe primaries.
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.
There was never a case for it. The whole project is complete bobbins. It is a spur of a Europe-wide network, nothing to to with Britain's needs. It should be built to Crewe, and to Euston, using as much private money as possible, just to avoid it being a completely useless carbuncle.
The Wcml is at capacity - you want to replace the route from Manchester to a London and then use the current WCML for slower stopping services.
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
There is unused capacity on the ECML. Paths being squandered on 5 coach trains when they could be used by 9 or 10 car. And there's going to be more of this from December.
The only 5 coach trains are the private operators who should be banned - but they are running a profitable service for reasons I won’t cover as it would be libel
Only libel if it’s not true, no?
There is a leap which is obvious but where no documentation exists so I’m not going there but think Government minister, the company involved and who bought that Government minister’s company
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
I’d be intrigued to meet the pregnant woman who avoids paracetamol in favour of opioids. Yes delaying / splitting the mmr feels a net negative. But it’s hard to characterise this as the most batshit crazy thing ever, given Tony, the patron saint of the nhs, apparently believed the same as RFK/Trump.
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.
Last time I was getting the train from Glasgow to Sheffield - it was cheaper and quicker to get the train down to London, then back up to Sheffield than to just book a 'direct' train that was more 'as the crow flies'.
Glasgow to Sheffield is Cross Country. They are the fare setter. They set high fares to discourage too many people from travelling on their inadequately short trains.
Worst UK train operator IMHO.
They should combine two units so they can run 8, 9 or 10 carriage trains. They could split at Birmingham with one unit going to Southampton and the other to Plymouth. They could split at Edinburgh with one unit going to Glasgow and the other going to Aberdeen or Inverness. However, as Cross Country don’t serve London, the DFT and the Treasury don’t care how poor their service is.
The Jack Smith trial should be interesting. If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly. https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
He wants to testify in public . But the GOP could stop that .
How ?
He’s due to appear before Congress . But the GOP have the majority on the relevant committee so could block him from testifying in front of the cameras .
I was talking about Trump's attempt to imprison him, not the pitiful Congressional dog and pony show. Given Johnson may never call them back in session anyway....
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
I think it's just the familiar impulse to normalise his severely abnormal behaviour.
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…
I honestly don't get why anyone would ride one of those things unless they're a foaming-at-the-mouth greenie. A scooter will do everything it does much better, for half the price, and you can use it for long trips too.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
I’d be intrigued to meet the pregnant woman who avoids paracetamol in favour of opioids. Yes delaying / splitting the mmr feels a net negative. But it’s hard to characterise this as the most batshit crazy thing ever, given Tony, the patron saint of the nhs, apparently believed the same as RFK/Trump.
Badmouthing paracetamol (based on zero evidence) is going to put everyone off taking it, and what do you think pregnant women in lots of pain (who believe Trump) are going to do.
Blair clearly did not believe the same as RFK Jr., or Trump, and your dislike of Blair is sweet, but fairly irrelevant for the modern world. It’s Trump and RFK Jr. who are in power.
Mr Lammy issued all prison chiefs with a new three-page mandatory list of as many as 30 checks that governors will have to personally oversee before any prisoner can be released.
These include identifying “high-profile” prisoners, about whom governors will consult a new special support unit in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) before they are freed or deported.
Prisons must also check all warrants, including for deportation, are in order; ensure staff who oversee releases are trained to the right grade; and conduct checks with other agencies
However, governors warned it would add to the workloads of already-overstretched staff and questioned whether it would solve a problem that has yet to be identified by any investigation. The new checks could take as long as 45 minutes per prisoner, one source said.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
I think it's just the familiar impulse to normalise his severely abnormal behaviour.
Trump is not a normal dude and behaves extraordinarily atypically. But all the same I would not be in the least surprised if this US admin ends up as a net beneficiary to long term US health, even if in the short term politics around Obamacare are a net detriment. I just find the unflinching hyperbolic criticism quite tedious.
It’s not like Jeffrey Dahmer was on the run . Media hysteria. Manhunt normally involves the man actually trying to get away from the police not trying to get back into prison and it’s not as if a SWAT team had to apprehend him .
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
I think it's simpler than that. They're not mad: they "did the research". For any given medical condition there is a multiplicity of opinions as to cause and cures. If you have a pre-existing idea as to cause/cure and distrust of experts, then the combination of algorithmic feeds, Google and AI will give you sources to support that idea, and bolstered by what the Internet is telling you is unimpeachable truth, you will provide what you think is best advice but is actually bullshit. We have a real ontological problem now, and it's going to get people killed. Witness the dramatic fall in vaccine takeup in the UK.
I remind you of my existing stance that algorithmic feeds should be banned, AI in search engine searches should be banned, and search engines providers forced to provide search results in order of relevance. Until we do that, we are genuinely fucked.
Food assistance used by more than 40 million Americans will not be distributed from November due to the ongoing US government shutdown, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) is used by one in every eight Americans, and plays a vital role in many grocery budgets.
It’s not like Jeffrey Dahmer was on the run . Media hysteria. Manhunt normally involves the man actually trying to get away from the police not trying to get back into prison and it’s not as if a SWAT team had to apprehend him .
They've normally escaped, which is marginally less embarrassing for the government
Whilst in Malaysia Trump seems to have found time to tweet that childhood vaccines are a disaster unless you split them in weird ways and paracetamol is very very bad.
Bonkers.
Mad as a box of frogs.
And yet 40% of US voters - give or take - still support.
And Reform UK are aping him all the way.
Brexit and Reform is our version of Peronism.
Trump has far more in common with Peron than Milei too.
That's fng rich from a supporter of the party that tried to take £5bn off the future growth of the welfare bill and ended up adding to it.
But, sure, Moonshine, let’s be fair to Trump. Just because he has repeatedly assaulted women, hung out with Epstein and is covering up for him after his death, tried to overthrow democracy and encouraged attacks on his own Vice-President, has undermined the rule of law in the US, has repeatedly damaged the world economy with an erratic tariff policy, has slowed support for Ukraine and keeps cosying up to Putin, has threatened to attack Canada, Greenland and Panama, fiddled his taxes, supported racists, illegally deployed the National Guard against his own citizens, demolished the White House east wing without the usual permissions, is trying to extort his own government for $230 million, pardoned numerous sex offenders, made fun of the disabled, denies climate change, and believes exercise is bad for you, is no reason to treat his views on vaccines unfairly.
It’s not like Jeffrey Dahmer was on the run . Media hysteria. Manhunt normally involves the man actually trying to get away from the police not trying to get back into prison and it’s not as if a SWAT team had to apprehend him .
They've normally escaped, which is marginally less embarrassing for the government
Apparently there were over 200 accidental releases last year.
Mr Lammy issued all prison chiefs with a new three-page mandatory list of as many as 30 checks that governors will have to personally oversee before any prisoner can be released.
These include identifying “high-profile” prisoners, about whom governors will consult a new special support unit in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) before they are freed or deported.
Prisons must also check all warrants, including for deportation, are in order; ensure staff who oversee releases are trained to the right grade; and conduct checks with other agencies
However, governors warned it would add to the workloads of already-overstretched staff and questioned whether it would solve a problem that has yet to be identified by any investigation. The new checks could take as long as 45 minutes per prisoner, one source said.
45 minutes doesn’t seem long to ensure the public are safe, and to carry out checks that seem common-sense and that I would expect prison staff to already be routinely carrying out.
When and why did the right wing decide self professed medical expertise was the way to go?
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
It's long bubbling on the American right but Covid sent them mad.
Plus they've been conditioned to accept every lie Trump utters.
It predates him, but he has demonstrated he can change their minds, he does not simply follow on all issues, so on this one he's playing to the gallery.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
It’s actually quite difficult to obtain the chicken pox vaccine for your child in this country. Until 2017 Hepatitis B was a private vaccine given upon request if you were travelling to high risk areas. Breaking the mmr into separate shots is an inconvenience the Blairs reportedly put upon themselves. I’ve not a doctor but I’ve not heard of anyone dying because of paracetamol avoidance. But yeah we hate Trump! Boooo to Trump!
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
Breaking the MMR into separate shots is well demonstrated to reduce how many kids are fully vaccinated because parents are more likely not to get around to having all the shots. That increases the chance of those diseases spreading. 2025 has already seen more measles cases in the US than any prior year this millennium. There have been more cases than all of 2000-2013 put together. There have been 3 deaths so far this year.
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
I think it's just the familiar impulse to normalise his severely abnormal behaviour.
Trump is not a normal dude and behaves extraordinarily atypically. But all the same I would not be in the least surprised if this US admin ends up as a net beneficiary to long term US health, even if in the short term politics around Obamacare are a net detriment. I just find the unflinching hyperbolic criticism quite tedious.
Comments
At least on a teams call you can roll your eyes and swear (as long as your muted and don't have a camera on).
Only a matter of time before Reform go that route (if not already) and the Tories follow suit. My most Trumpian acquaintance is all over it already.
So often i end up responding to people with a variation of "I don't know man, it's probably fine and you probably didn't need to ask me".
It's wonder they're not even more expensive.... ;-)
This aspect is one reason in favour of larger STV constituencies - say 6 MPs per constituency - because parties will be more likely to stand multiple candidates.
I remember a few years ago when I wanted to go Sheffield to Edinburgh it was cheaper for me to buy a ticket (first class) from King's to Edinburgh.
So I had the option to spend £5 to catch a train to Doncaster to catch that London King's X train.
And we're a long time past anyone on his side questioning anything he says, even inconsequential stuff.
Edit: not that I approve either of the TOCs' nonsense.
Both tomorrow and Wednesday I will be sat in First class with split tickets and a Seatfrog upgrade - the only question they will ask is how much the upgrade was this time and sorry that the gin is still in a can
Shame on him and what about the child, the family, and others traumatised by this incident
https://news.sky.com/story/justice-secretary-highlights-sky-news-reporting-as-he-says-migrant-release-mistake-totally-unacceptable-13458157
And the same is true for the ECML and Midland mainline - provided a different route for direct London services would have done a world of good for services between stations
I didn't bother about split ticketing as work were paying for it.
Bonkers.
Mad as a box of frogs.
And yet 40% of US voters - give or take - still support.
On Netflix
He sacrificed himself to ensure a VSC to stop Verstappen overtaking Leclerc.
The really dangerous political intervention of recent years into the vaccine debate was forcing the Covid vaccine onto the young, for very unclear net health benefit, even when it was known it did not provide effective herd immunity either.
But the point is that, as I have said many times on here before, we should be reducing - breaking would be preferable - the power of the parties not increasing it. The way you do this is through reform in Parliament. Reduce the ability of parties to blackmail or bribe the MPs to vote along party lines. Start by making every vote a free vote. The Government wins by force of argument and persuasion not by threat. D'hondt and any other system that assigns the seat by party increases the power of parties, not reduces it.
Trump has far more in common with Peron than Milei too.
What a glorious legacy
The rest of it was a bit meh sadly - would have worked better if they had merged the story lines about 2/3rd of the way through.
If it gets that far.
“Among the terabytes of evidence Smith amassed in his investigation, including a forensic copy of Trump's own phone documenting his digital activity on Jan. 6, are draft versions of his speech…showing it was hurriedly changed to target Pence directly.
https://x.com/jmart/status/1982448118843990190
You're not a doctor, I know plenty who exasperated by Trump and RFK Jr.
I have also praised Trump on this thread for his initial approach to the vaccine.
Trump's comments today will be seen even more damaging then when he suggested drinking bleach to combat Covid.
What did Timothy Mellon actually buy for $130,000,000?
https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/1982456987116879899
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/23/politics/jack-smith-asks-to-testify-congress
If you’re not using paracetamol for pain, you might turn to other painkillers, like opioids. About 80,000 people a year in the US are already dying because of opioid overdoses. It’s a huge problem. You don’t want to be putting people off an effective and safer analgesic.
And, really, are you going to go yay to Trump?
At least in the case of the theoretical d'Hondt voter, it is possible to cast a vote that may influence who else might be elected in additional to the candidate you don't want. No chance of that where I am. Idiot in the Blue Rosette wins every time, and nobody else has a chance.
(I suspect next time, if nothing changes in between, it will be the Idiot in the Light Blue Rosette)
Given Johnson may never call them back in session anyway....
Blair clearly did not believe the same as RFK Jr., or Trump, and your dislike of Blair is sweet, but fairly irrelevant for the modern world. It’s Trump and RFK Jr. who are in power.
These include identifying “high-profile” prisoners, about whom governors will consult a new special support unit in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) before they are freed or deported.
Prisons must also check all warrants, including for deportation, are in order; ensure staff who oversee releases are trained to the right grade; and conduct checks with other agencies
However, governors warned it would add to the workloads of already-overstretched staff and questioned whether it would solve a problem that has yet to be identified by any investigation. The new checks could take as long as 45 minutes per prisoner, one source said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/26/david-lammy-prison-governors-prevent-epping-migrant-fiasco/
I remind you of my existing stance that algorithmic feeds should be banned, AI in search engine searches should be banned, and search engines providers forced to provide search results in order of relevance. Until we do that, we are genuinely fucked.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d9j7p5qo
I've deleted your comment.
Don't go there.