I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
We are still using the oil and gas. Just importing it.
But not counting carbon in imports is standard meteorology in government.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
If you're content to burn imports but stop drilling, you don't give a shit about the planet.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas. Exciting times for British oil and gas!
I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.
It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.
We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.
All parties are pretty much all over the place when it comes to energy, including the SNP. Labour are probably suffering the worst given their empty GB Energy bollox. Just Transition should be the clear aim but life and politics are messy, the Chinese wind turbine manufacture in the north of Scotland blocked for 'security' reasons a case in point.
The Arbroath and Broughty Ferry result suggests the Murrell problem is a hill of beans, much as Scottish media would wish otherwise.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
I don't disagree with you but it is maybe also worth pointing out that the Tories' vote share in Makerfield fell from 10.9% to 2.2%, which illustrates the hill they have to climb.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
Especially with Polanski's balloon already fast deflating, and the LibDems struggling to make an impact despite their 70-odd MPs, it is beginning to look credible that - as during previous parliaments - suggestions that the old Labour v Tory contest is dead may be premature. Unless Burnham does actually change the voting system, of course.
Next instalment in Farage's slow descent from the peak...Reform failing to win the Manchester mayoral
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
As much as some protest the argument is being lost and Rosebank and Jackdaw must be near certain to be approved now
GB News seem to be utterly committed to being Reform TV with no exit in view since they employ some of them including Farage, but what about press outlets such as the Telegraph or the Express or the Spectator?
From observations of BTL comments, and accepting that it is perhaps largely noise, there is plenty of wild assertion (eg hang SKS from a lamp post) at GB News and the Telegraph, which are not free / open access (Telegraph is subscription, GB News has "featured comments" for those who pay).
To me there is some similarity to the noisy libertarian political bloggers from the late noughties, who used to do things like post pictures of hanging nooses from time to time.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
Collapsing the industry there, with high energy prices, is especially stupid.
We're talking about extracting maybe 5% more out of North Sea than we would otherwise do when production is reducing by about a third every five years. I think we should do it but it's irrelevant in the scheme of things. The future is elsewhere.
The point that is being missed is we should maximise our own oil and gas whilst transitioning to the future
Indeed I expect Burnham will authorise the continuing development of the North Sea
I am OK with that. I should add I was very sympathetic to the miners as well. But geology always wins. And here this market is also moving away from O&G. If Hormuz stays open there will be a worldwide glut. Highly marginal Scottish production doesn't compete sadly.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
We are still using the oil and gas. Just importing it.
But not counting carbon in imports is standard meteorology in government.
I’d go much further on reducing consumption and copy the Ukrainian eco-warriors. Unrestricted submarine warfare on cruise ships, shoot down private jets etc etc.
We have a proud tradition on the Atlantic Slave Trade which we should now apply to carbon emissions.
Very bad for the SNP? They lost the constituency, sure, but only dropped 5% but increased their share in Arbroath. The Tory votes came from Labour. So, it was yet another election about the Starmer government. Same message as Makerfield in my opinion.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
I don't disagree with you but it is maybe also worth pointing out that the Tories' vote share in Makerfield fell from 10.9% to 2.2%, which illustrates the hill they have to climb.
I took the exact opposite message - the old Tory vote has been significantly squeezed here from the GE because we are polarising around Reform/Anti-Reform tactical voting patterns.
Very bad for the SNP? They lost the constituency, sure, but only dropped 5% but increased their share in Arbroath. The Tory votes came from Labour. So, it was yet another election about the Starmer government. Same message as Makerfield in my opinion.
They're down to 8 seats. Continuing to roll backwards and already in a terrible mess of trying to govern in Holyrood. And the moron elected in Arbroath parrots the script about their clear mandate for independence. No, you're continuing to slide.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
Nah, it’s really important because you have people (even on PB) saying that O&G could fund 3% defence, or abolishing the triple lock could save 10s of billions in this parliament.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
The matter probably isn't simple but this definitely isn't a fact, as @Eabhal is trying to point out with actual numbers. But never let reality get in the way of a simple fact.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
I don't disagree with you but it is maybe also worth pointing out that the Tories' vote share in Makerfield fell from 10.9% to 2.2%, which illustrates the hill they have to climb.
I took the exact opposite message - the old Tory vote has been significantly squeezed here from the GE because we are polarising around Reform/Anti-Reform tactical voting patterns.
(But good on Scotland - the SCons are an entirely different kettle of fantastic Scottish sea food and Reform are nowhere to be seen.)
The issue for the North Sea and Aberdeen is Basin Collapse;
At present the cost of legacy infrastructure, pipelines, hubs, inter-connectors are spread over existing producers.
Over time as the cost of upgrading and maintaining it rises and the number of producers fall the burden on each rises and you reach a point where you get rapid decline.
Think of the cost of stamps, the cost of delivery is covered by the number of letters delivered but if email replaces snail mail the cost of each stamp rises until no one will buy stamps.
Denmark has already stopped delivering letters!
Much like Coal we have two choices, the German model; Invest in alternatives in mining areas before you close the mines or the British model; close the mines and struggle to pick up the pieces.
I listen to people talk about opening new fields and it reminds me of Scargill talking about “The cheapest deep mined Coal!”.
It was, but it was far more expensive than open cast from abroad.
I hear the same, “We understand our Industry better than politicians!” and think of all the fishing communities globally that have said “There’s plenty of Fish!”
Right up till the stocks collapsed.
If we don’t transition as widely and rapidly as we can if the next decade we are facing what happened to mining communities in the twenty years from 75-95 when jobs went from 250k to 50k.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
Especially with Polanski's balloon already fast deflating, and the LibDems struggling to make an impact despite their 70-odd MPs, it is beginning to look credible that - as during previous parliaments - suggestions that the old Labour v Tory contest is dead may be premature. Unless Burnham does actually change the voting system, of course.
Next instalment in Farage's slow descent from the peak...Reform failing to win the Manchester mayoral
Surely Bum Sniffer Rob was such a fantastic local candidate only defeated for 'reasons', he'll be a shoo in for the mayoral candidate?
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
Nah, it’s really important because you have people (even on PB) saying that O&G could fund 3% defence, or abolishing the triple lock could save 10s of billions in this parliament.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
On both sides, it's a bit of a bike shed debate. In the context of a nation over thirty years, the tax raised is frankly a rounding error- even on the most optimistic scenario. Equally, the green arguments aren't that important on a global scale.
Understandably, it matters a lot to people involved in the industry. Less respectable, it matters to partisans playing football with the issue. But the importance some are attaching to the issue just shows how frivolous a lot of our politics is.
Very bad for the SNP? They lost the constituency, sure, but only dropped 5% but increased their share in Arbroath. The Tory votes came from Labour. So, it was yet another election about the Starmer government. Same message as Makerfield in my opinion.
They're down to 8 seats. Continuing to roll backwards and already in a terrible mess of trying to govern in Holyrood. And the moron elected in Arbroath parrots the script about their clear mandate for independence. No, you're continuing to slide.
Och well, at least they 're not headed to electoral oblivion as someone with the initials RP was predicting six months ago.
GB News seem to be utterly committed to being Reform TV with no exit in view since they employ some of them including Farage, but what about press outlets such as the Telegraph or the Express or the Spectator?
From observations of BTL comments, and accepting that it is perhaps largely noise, there is plenty of wild assertion (eg hang SKS from a lamp post) at GB News and the Telegraph, which are not free / open access (Telegraph is subscription, GB News has "featured comments" for those who pay).
To me there is some similarity to the noisy libertarian political bloggers from the late noughties, who used to do things like post pictures of hanging nooses from time to time.
Long running outfits like DTel, Speccie, Express will do whatever needs to be done to sustain their viability. The Speccie has a long history of sustaining a coherent Burkean polity, lost in recent years in favour of a posh post modernity with sharp edges all over the place, though at least it is sometimes funny. It would be greatly improved if it had a sustainable and coherent editorial position. I don't think it ever fully recovered from Conrad Black.
They will all retreat in moments from and playing with the Far Right as soon as it is convenient to do so.
What the serious centrist media lack at the moment is sufficient editorial positioning that it is possible for them to promote solutions and visions within the realm of the possible. As the FT and Economist did brilliantly some years ago. The centre left New Statesman is woefully bad in this regard. I have no idea where it stands on anything.
Don't know enough about GB News to comment. Does anyone watch/listen?
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas. Exciting times for British oil and gas!
I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.
It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs, jobs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.
We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.
We do indeed need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock in the long term, so where is the sense in extracting our reserves and burning them now? It just makes us a future economic hostage to those with bigger reserves. We should be carefully managing our remaining reserves, not burning through them as quickly as possible.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
Nah, it’s really important because you have people (even on PB) saying that O&G could fund 3% defence, or abolishing the triple lock could save 10s of billions in this parliament.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
[Citation Needed]
It could contribute to that.
I don't see anyone saying it will be sufficient on its own.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
It's the complete inability of people, not just on pb.com, to cope with counterfactuals. An amount of revenue will be raised anyway. Question is how much additional revenue will be raised with the policy. As the policy is predicated on reducing tax rates because they are deemed a disincentive to investment, and given the policy will only enable a marginal increase in production due to geology, logically the policy leads to a net reduction in revenue. It may be worth foregoing revenue because the extra production is more valuable than the net loss of revenue. But that's the decision to be made.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
The matter probably isn't simple but this definitely isn't a fact, as @Eabhal is trying to point out with actual numbers. But never let reality get in the way of a simple fact.
It is a fact.
Eabhal is denigrating the actual numbers by changing them into percentages of GDP, but deflating a number by making it a percentage of GDP does not change the number. Its still billions of revenue.
Very bad for the SNP? They lost the constituency, sure, but only dropped 5% but increased their share in Arbroath. The Tory votes came from Labour. So, it was yet another election about the Starmer government. Same message as Makerfield in my opinion.
They're down to 8 seats. Continuing to roll backwards and already in a terrible mess of trying to govern in Holyrood. And the moron elected in Arbroath parrots the script about their clear mandate for independence. No, you're continuing to slide.
I thought it was an odd comment to choose with the Aberdeen result. She got less than 10k votes, albeit on a poor turnout.
Interesting James Adams has said he will stand down as a Councillor, there's at least 1, maybe 2 Councillors at Holyrood who have decided not to resign after becoming an MSP so far. less than 11 months left on their term with the next council vote in May 2027.
As for Makerfield, I said at the start that Burnham would walk it and he did. Surprised at the majority but even so, this is a by election we will be talking about for decades.
Two big takeaways:
Reform are over. They can’t win by-elections, when they win council elections they shed councillors because they are racists or mad or even the ones they keep are in capable of the basics. And they virtue signal like crazy having said they would scrap all the one virtue signalling. In essence, most voters aren’t racist fuck morons as Farage hopes they are. They’ve seen through him, they care not for cockwomble ex-Tory grifters like Jenrick, and the slide to Restore will gather pace as what is the point of Farage now?
Burnham will not face a contest. Not after this. A 6k majority over Reform and Restore combined is hope for all the 24 intake that they can win in 29. By delivering change as they were elected to do. The first change? Taxi for Starmer.
A for what Burnham will do, well there’s a big challenge there. But he’s already shown the way in GM so expect a lot of that to copy across. Invest in place - streets, communities, facilities. Scrap daft targets and let the police police. Pride in yourself and your town and your country. That worker bee ethos is desperately needed.
As Thatcha once said, Rejoice
Why do you spoil good analysis with hyberbole?
(1) This by-election won't be talked about "for decades", and Burnham probably won't even be PM in 3 years time, and; (2) Reform are not "over"
The tea leaves might be starting to tell us some quite interesting things, but don't overdo it.
I think it will be talked about for decades, even if Labour lose the next election; it's an inflection point in the country's political history. And Rochdale is right about the change in mood and approach - I suspect a lot of Londoners don't fully grasp that.
It won't be talked about for decades.
It's significant now and will be ancient history once Andy Burnham loses office.
We still talk about the Leyton by election 61 years on. I don't remember it myself as I was only just developing an interest in Labour Party politics then, oh and I was only three.
Bermondsey, Smethwick, Eastbourne, Hamilton, Orpington, your elections took one hell of a beating!
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas. Exciting times for British oil and gas!
I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.
It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs, jobs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.
We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.
We do indeed need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock in the long term, so where is the sense in extracting our reserves and burning them now? It just makes us a future economic hostage to those with bigger reserves. We should be carefully managing our remaining reserves, not burning through them as quickly as possible.
We are decommissioning the infrastructure and the platforms. This is a legal requirement from the government - dismantle and remove.
Starting again from nothing would not be economic.
Touch of Alien v. Predator but good to see old hatchet face get a doing.
Supertanskiii @supertanskiii “And you don’t like seeing brown faces on TV”
Thangam Debbonaire just spectacularly lost her shit and absolutely battered the living daylights out of Sarah Pochin live on SkyNews (despite England winning their World Cup game against Croatia).
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
The matter probably isn't simple but this definitely isn't a fact, as @Eabhal is trying to point out with actual numbers. But never let reality get in the way of a simple fact.
It is a fact.
Eabhal is denigrating the actual numbers by changing them into percentages of GDP, but deflating a number by making it a percentage of GDP does not change the number. Its still billions of revenue.
Incorrect, I converted into a percentage of tax revenue to demonstrate the relatively tiny size of the increase in revenue.
For the umpteenth time, I don’t disagree with the broad policy idea but do take serious umbrage at how it is framed from a fiscal perspective.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas. Exciting times for British oil and gas!
I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.
It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs, jobs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.
We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.
We do indeed need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock in the long term, so where is the sense in extracting our reserves and burning them now? It just makes us a future economic hostage to those with bigger reserves. We should be carefully managing our remaining reserves, not burning through them as quickly as possible.
We are decommissioning the infrastructure and the platforms. This is a legal requirement from the government - dismantle and remove.
Starting again from nothing would not be economic.
In that case there is something wrong with the economics. It is just insane to extract and burn a finite resource that will be essential in the future for use as a chemical feedstock.
It's really strange to have been watching politics long enough to have witnessed Mr Burnham go from being the leadership candidate of whom many felt He'll do, I suppose to seeing him hailed as the answer to Labour’s prayers.
The drowning man does not look the gift straw in the mouth.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
That Reform surge in full after 5 by-elections this parliament.
Aggregate majorities achieved:
Labour 9231 Con 6050 SNP 5178 Green 4402 Reform 6
If tactical voting was obvious in the GE I would put Reforms chances of winning a majority close to 0. It is clear voters are willing to coalesce to prevent Reform from winning, it is less obvious how to do that in lots of constituencies at the moment however. Also in favour is I don't think many voters of any the "establishment" parties are particularly enthused by their own party so will be in a more willing mood to vote anti Reform as their primary objective.
Touch of Alien v. Predator but good to see old hatchet face get a doing.
Supertanskiii @supertanskiii “And you don’t like seeing brown faces on TV”
Thangam Debbonaire just spectacularly lost her shit and absolutely battered the living daylights out of Sarah Pochin live on SkyNews (despite England winning their World Cup game against Croatia).
The thing that's been missing during all this is mainstream politicians saying to Reform "no, you're bang out of order." If a Burnham premiership is the price of giving people permission to say that... Maybe it's a price worth paying.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
Self-aggrandisement is lauded as a motivation for economic development, but denigrated when it comes to environmental or charitable issues. Why is that?
Incidentally, checking some old bets and Garbett[sp] tipped by Mr. Eagles at 61 for next London mayor is down to 9 on Ladbrokes. Hoping to hedge that later.
Also, I made a tiny bet on the Victoria state election, laying Labor at under evens, then just backed at 3.55. Might try looking at more things like that over the weekend, time permitting (checking polls, starting position, etc). Only a little profit, but it's a nice result given it's an entirely new thing for me.
And, as mentioned, Norris at 11 each way in Austria is worth contemplating.
That Reform surge in full after 5 by-elections this parliament.
Aggregate majorities achieved:
Labour 9231 Con 6050 SNP 5178 Green 4402 Reform 6
If tactical voting was obvious in the GE I would put Reforms chances of winning a majority close to 0. It is clear voters are willing to coalesce to prevent Reform from winning, it is less obvious how to do that in lots of constituencies at the moment however. Also in favour is I don't think many voters of any the "establishment" parties are particularly enthused by their own party so will be in a more willing mood to vote anti Reform as their primary objective.
Given Labour have so many sitting MPs, who would be the obvious choice for tactical voters, there's a scenario where anti-Reform feelings lead to another huge Labour majority.
I wonder if it would help Labour for Farage to stick around.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
I don't disagree with you but it is maybe also worth pointing out that the Tories' vote share in Makerfield fell from 10.9% to 2.2%, which illustrates the hill they have to climb.
I took the exact opposite message - the old Tory vote has been significantly squeezed here from the GE because we are polarising around Reform/Anti-Reform tactical voting patterns.
Yes. The Tories need to decide, and in not too long, how to frame the next election. Implausibly their single message would be 'We can and will win 325+ seats - Vote Tory'. But their sub text has to be either: Vote Tory as part of the Right of Centre package with Reform; or Vote Tory as part of the Not Reform Tactical Alliance. They can't do both; so their current position - confused - has to shift. The decision is not easy. But they would be assisted in their tactics if they bear in mind two things: Tories are not an entirely amoral shower of chancers even if they look like it; they have lost millions of centre votes for a reason. Finally, the Tories need to remember the great political truth: Only kick a man when he is down.
Not trying to put a gloss on a disappointing result (Honest!) but what we saw in Aberdeen is what we have been seeing in Council elections for years now;
The SNP starts ahead as the biggest Party but gets overtaken as one by one candidates drop out under STV and then gradually the Unionist vote coalesces around the eventual winner.
Rather than look at vote share and change just compare vote to vote between 24-26;
SNP; -46%, Con; +23%, Reform; -75%,LibDem; -54%, Green -43% and Labour; -87%.
I won’t take anything away from the fact that a lot of SNP voters stayed at home, turnout at 31% was just over half 2024’s 60% or that some might have voted against us in protest but I think the big story is people piling in behind the Tories to beat the SNP.
Not sour grapes or an excuse just accepting an electoral reality: when are opponents are split we win when opposition coalesces…
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
I wonder if that’s what the people on Venus said before the runaway greenhouse kicked off.
(Sorry just had a comment evanished due to an inadvertent mention of the GG words).
Leaving that bit out, this is the Manchester Evening News piece on potential Mayoral candidates, and I think the Restore UK one Marlon West, if his background is as reported (elsewhere eg Sky News), will animate the election.
And politically it is logical for them to run him.
The Aberdeen result is a good result for the Tories but it doesn’t tell us anything about their strength where it really matters for a GE, in England.
Makerfield reminds us that to win you have to unite the left or the right coalition. The Tories and Reform are fighting for the same votes and @williamglenn ’s wet dream of a Tory v Reform duopoly is fanciful at present. The left wont vote Tory in a GE in England especially unless something drastic happens.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.
2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry. "I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."
Another question - will we finally get electoral reform with Burnham? I expect it to be in the next manifesto. That will really help to hoover up Green and LibDem votes you would expect.
Incidentally, checking some old bets and Garbett[sp] tipped by Mr. Eagles at 61 for next London mayor is down to 9 on Ladbrokes. Hoping to hedge that later.
Also, I made a tiny bet on the Victoria state election, laying Labor at under evens, then just backed at 3.55. Might try looking at more things like that over the weekend, time permitting (checking polls, starting position, etc). Only a little profit, but it's a nice result given it's an entirely new thing for me.
And, as mentioned, Norris at 11 each way in Austria is worth contemplating.
Legendary modesty klaxon.
Let us not forget the 250/1 winning tip on Max Verstappen to win the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.
That Reform surge in full after 5 by-elections this parliament.
Aggregate majorities achieved:
Labour 9231 Con 6050 SNP 5178 Green 4402 Reform 6
If tactical voting was obvious in the GE I would put Reforms chances of winning a majority close to 0. It is clear voters are willing to coalesce to prevent Reform from winning, it is less obvious how to do that in lots of constituencies at the moment however. Also in favour is I don't think many voters of any the "establishment" parties are particularly enthused by their own party so will be in a more willing mood to vote anti Reform as their primary objective.
Given Labour have so many sitting MPs, who would be the obvious choice for tactical voters, there's a scenario where anti-Reform feelings lead to another huge Labour majority.
I wonder if it would help Labour for Farage to stick around.
Yes. Holding 400+ seats places Labour at a disadvantage because they are the current not very good government, but a huge advantage because they are the most obvious tactical Not Reform vote in all those seats, including my quite Tory one.
Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.
This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)
not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.
There's a chance. Not easy, but better for the big two despite the risible Tory score in Makerfield.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
Nah, it’s really important because you have people (even on PB) saying that O&G could fund 3% defence, or abolishing the triple lock could save 10s of billions in this parliament.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
It's more much important to be honest about direction than scale.
Lower taxes, lower spending and less regulation are what's needed to get GDP growth up from 0.5%-1%/year to more like 2-3%.
The deluded are those that claim it isn't, contrary to economic theory and the great weight of empirical evidence.
The exact magnitude of the effects of different policies is important, but a secondary issue to the big change in direction we need. It's also quite difficult to know in advance. But that we need to change direction radically has been obvious for many years now.
Presume their political markets guy doesn't start work until 9am.
I want to take issue with your lauding of AndyJS on the previous thread. Yes, he predicted the 3 winners but virtually everybody predicted Makerfield & Arbroath correctly and split 50/50 on Aberdeen
His percentage predictions were rubbish though - from memory he had Makerfield and Aberdeen with less than one percent wins. He was about 20% out in Makerfield and Aberdeen wasn't much better. Loads of others predicted Burnham winning comfortably.
Well at least he's unlikely to be Labour's Liz Truss.
Burnham brings in top economists before possible leadership run https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/18/andy-burnham-top-economists-possible-leadership-run ..Burnham is understood to be getting advice from Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, as well as Richard Hughes, a former chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Jim O’Neill, a crossbench peer and former Treasury minister who worked on George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”..
Pretty sure they will tell them there is no effing money. Then what? He has won as a change candidate and will be unable to afford the changes he (and the country) wants. Back in the same mess by next summer.
Possibly. Sold a bit better and some earlier stuff coming to fruition. But the constraints are still there.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
Sanctimonious, much?
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.
2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry. "I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."
This could be pun.
A pastiche quiche unleashed.
Canonically, a quiche is a sub-category of flan. Are you from South of Watford?
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas. Exciting times for British oil and gas!
I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.
It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs, jobs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.
We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.
We do indeed need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock in the long term, so where is the sense in extracting our reserves and burning them now? It just makes us a future economic hostage to those with bigger reserves. We should be carefully managing our remaining reserves, not burning through them as quickly as possible.
We are decommissioning the infrastructure and the platforms. This is a legal requirement from the government - dismantle and remove.
Starting again from nothing would not be economic.
In that case there is something wrong with the economics. It is just insane to extract and burn a finite resource that will be essential in the future for use as a chemical feedstock.
Billions in infrastructure exist now. It’s not just a hole in sea floor with a rig floating above it.
It is being systematically and expensively removed.
If it is needed again, it will require billions to rebuild.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
I wonder if that’s what the people on Venus said before the runaway greenhouse kicked off.
Do you genuinely believe that we are at risk of a runaway greenhouse effect?
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
What is the mechanism behind 'kill billions'? Warmer world for the some means fewer deaths in winter. Likely greater crop yields (CO2 fertilisation) and warmth and wet (warmer planet, more rain).
Clearly an excellent night for Burnham and Kemi and a bad night for Farage and Starmer and not a great night for Swinney either. Burnham won and even increased the Labour voteshare in Makerfield on 2024 squeezing the LDs and Greens especially and now has a mandate to challenge Starmer. He would likely win a members ballot too anyway whatever Harman says.
Kemi is clearly seeing the Conservatives make gains in Scotland as well as London where they have squeezed the Labour vote and where Reform are weaker. The Conservatives gain from the SNP in Aberdeen South will be a blow to Swinney only a month after he failed to win an SNP Holyrood majority though some relief for him they still held Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
Bad night for Farage as Reform not only failed to beat Burnham and Labour in Makerfield, a top Reform target seat but saw Restore get 7% of the vote. While Restore did not match Lowe's hype they took enough votes from Reform to almost outweigh Reform gains of Conservative voters in the strong Leave seat
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
We’ve repeatedly debunked the £25 billion figure BigG.
No you haven't
We gain tax from more exploration which is not being paid at present at an estimate of 2.5 billion pa
Yes I have and it’s very silly to repeatedly come to a forum like PB with it. OEUK, which is the O&G lobby, reckon it’s about £1.5 billion per annum assuming full liberalisation of licensing and large cuts to EPL.
Their own model suggests a significant reduction in tax revenue while we wait for O&G activity to bump up a bit (in relative terms - it will still be declining in line with the overall trend). The implied future revenue is all indirect - payroll, supply chain etc. That subject to an awful lot of uncertainty.
I’m not against this but it doesn’t help the cause suggesting that there is significant cash available here - a 0.14% increase in tax revenue over a decade, and that’s a very optimistic estimate.
Any increase in tax revenue is significant.
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
Agree of course but I’m going to call out any crap fiscal analysis where I see, whether it’s claims about short term savings from removing the triple lock, the Greens double locking benefits, or mad tax numbers that even the lobbyists won’t stretch to.
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Sorry but its utter bullshit spin to denigrate any change.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
Nah, it’s really important because you have people (even on PB) saying that O&G could fund 3% defence, or abolishing the triple lock could save 10s of billions in this parliament.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
It's more much important to be honest about direction than scale.
Lower taxes, lower spending and less regulation are what's needed to get GDP growth up from 0.5%-1%/year to more like 2-3%.
The deluded are those that claim it isn't, contrary to economic theory and the great weight of empirical evidence.
The exact magnitude of the effects of different policies is important, but a secondary issue to the big change in direction we need. It's also quite difficult to know in advance. But that we need to change direction radically has been obvious for many years now.
That’s right if you want an economy like the US, which generates so much production but provides so little to its population. I’d much rather be a Finland than a Mississippi, even though their GDP per capitas are the same.
(And the US has insane levels of red tape, which suggests it’s something of a red herring on economic growth)
Question. In his inner self, today will the decent and bright Danny Kruger be thinking he did the right thing joining Reform? I think No.
I doubt it. He's relatively thoughtful but in my experience evangelizing personalities (on any subject) once they convert tend to really commit, even if the facts shift further they've mentally switched and won't divert back as it would call into question their initial choice.
Indecisive handwringers and the opportunistic can jump about easier.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
There are quite a few engineering firms around Aberdeen. They built up expertise over decades.
With the end of the local oil&gas industry (mostly) they pivoted to export. And did quite well.
Note that the engineering skills go far beyond just oil and gas equipment. Think small order, expensive custom products.
Lots of orders from around the world.
They are being decimated by high electricity costs.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
I wonder if that’s what the people on Venus said before the runaway greenhouse kicked off.
Do you genuinely believe that we are at risk of a runaway greenhouse effect?
That’s actually a salient point - most of the time we frame this debate as if the uncertainty in the models only runs in one direction, and there is some evidence that scientists are deliberately tempering their language to make their findings more palatable.
So yes, there probably is a risk, at least as large that the fuss we are making about climate change is overblown.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
At best, many members of our ruling classes genuinely believe engineering and tech is gauche and of less importance than the touchy-feely stuff. At worst, they think it's a threat to the status-quo they benefit from and thus the enemy.
Clearly an excellent night for Burnham and Kemi and a bad night for Farage and Starmer and not a great night for Swinney either. Burnham won and even increased the Labour voteshare in Makerfield on 2024 squeezing the LDs and Greens especially and now has a mandate to challenge Starmer. He would likely win a members ballot too anyway whatever Harman says.
Kemi is clearly seeing the Conservatives make gains in Scotland as well as London where they have squeezed the Labour vote and where Reform are weaker. The Conservatives gain from the SNP in Aberdeen South will be a blow to Swinney only a month after he failed to win an SNP Holyrood majority though some relief for him they still held Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
Bad night for Farage as Reform not only failed to beat Burnham and Labour in Makerfield, a top Reform target seat but saw Restore get 7% of the vote. While Restore did not match Lowe's hype they took enough votes from Reform to almost outweigh Reform gains of Conservative voters in the strong Leave seat
Is Swinney, who was always a bit caretaker-y, not long for the role? Flynn is clearly ambitious.
I guess the Holyrood result shields him for a while at least, but maybe not too long.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
What is the mechanism behind 'kill billions'? Warmer world for the some means fewer deaths in winter. Likely greater crop yields (CO2 fertilisation) and warmth and wet (warmer planet, more rain).
Likely changes in weather patterns are a net negative for agriculture - big risks particularly for China, southern Europe and elsewhere.
Higher CO2 will make crops very slightly more drought resistant, but not enough to compensate for the East Asian Monsoon failing.
I wouldn't say billions would die, unless civilization itself collapses, but it would be hard to pin that entirely on global warming. There would be other factors.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
At best, many members of our ruling classes genuinely believe engineering and tech is gauche and of less importance than the touchy-feely stuff. At worst, they think it's a threat to the status-quo they benefit from and thus the enemy.
The aggressive tone in the documents that came out of the BritVolt saga, towards technical knowledge, is instructive.
The issue for the North Sea and Aberdeen is Basin Collapse;
At present the cost of legacy infrastructure, pipelines, hubs, inter-connectors are spread over existing producers.
Over time as the cost of upgrading and maintaining it rises and the number of producers fall the burden on each rises and you reach a point where you get rapid decline.
Think of the cost of stamps, the cost of delivery is covered by the number of letters delivered but if email replaces snail mail the cost of each stamp rises until no one will buy stamps.
Denmark has already stopped delivering letters!
Much like Coal we have two choices, the German model; Invest in alternatives in mining areas before you close the mines or the British model; close the mines and struggle to pick up the pieces.
I listen to people talk about opening new fields and it reminds me of Scargill talking about “The cheapest deep mined Coal!”.
It was, but it was far more expensive than open cast from abroad.
I hear the same, “We understand our Industry better than politicians!” and think of all the fishing communities globally that have said “There’s plenty of Fish!”
Right up till the stocks collapsed.
If we don’t transition as widely and rapidly as we can if the next decade we are facing what happened to mining communities in the twenty years from 75-95 when jobs went from 250k to 50k.
Peter.
The decline in mining areas didn't start in 1975.
There were 750k miners in 1947 and 1.25m miners in 1914.
What did start after 1975 was the big redundancy payments and the landscaping and redevelopment of the old pits and slagheaps.
Question. In his inner self, today will the decent and bright Danny Kruger be thinking he did the right thing joining Reform? I think No.
I think he is the most likely first Reform -> Conservative refenestration in Parliament as he has a well defined ethical philosophy in his head, which means his moral compass has an axis.
There was already one sheepish Reform Councillor who has reverted to the Cons, and he may not have been the first. That was Robbie Lammas in Medway, who has a wonderful nearly Prime Ed Balls hairstyle and returned last week. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0npg1vdko
That lets me ask my favourite classic chicken joke: Why did the chicken cross the road and back again?
Presume their political markets guy doesn't start work until 9am.
I want to take issue with your lauding of AndyJS on the previous thread. Yes, he predicted the 3 winners but virtually everybody predicted Makerfield & Arbroath correctly and split 50/50 on Aberdeen
His percentage predictions were rubbish though - from memory he had Makerfield and Aberdeen with less than one percent wins. He was about 20% out in Makerfield and Aberdeen wasn't much better. Loads of others predicted Burnham winning comfortably.
If you were betting on the size of the victories, you'd be right. If you were betting on the fact of the victories, you'd be wrong.
Unlike many others, @Andy_JS made measurable and complete predictions at a given moment in time and didn't haver back and forth. That's useful and I can calculate their accuracy. If they are also right then that is a happy accident.
1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.
2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry. "I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."
This could be pun.
A pastiche quiche unleashed.
Canonically, a quiche is a sub-category of flan. Are you from South of Watford?
I am from very much North of Watford. 'Flan' is a word I would never use at all (except in reference to a strange boy at school with the name Flanagan). I find it oddly funny that my very South of Watford mother-in-law uses the word 'flan'. It's an even funnier word than 'quiche'.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
Sanctimonious, much?
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
It's a difficult one this. The pro-extraction arguments make a lot of sense when the UK is importing to consume. The slavery analogy doesn't stand up: yes abolishing it domestically while benefiting from foreign slavery through cheap imports is hypocritical, but unlike slavery the evils of oil extraction are global and in aggregate, not the cumulation of millions of individual tragedies.
On the other hand it's hard to argue this is anything but a tragedy of the commons.
Realistically we have to hope governments continue to support reduced consumption and alternative energy sources, so that hydrocarbons become over time a niche luxury good.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
I wonder if that’s what the people on Venus said before the runaway greenhouse kicked off.
Do you genuinely believe that we are at risk of a runaway greenhouse effect?
That’s actually a salient point - most of the time we frame this debate as if the uncertainty in the models only runs in one direction, and there is some evidence that scientists are deliberately tempering their language to make their findings more palatable.
So yes, there probably is a risk, at least as large that the fuss we are making about climate change is overblown.
There is zero risk of a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect. Earth is simply too far away from the Sun.
But, in general, the scientists have been cautious about highlighting low probability high impact risks because they haven't wanted to be labelled as alarmist, and because the fossil fuel funded lobbying efforts have successfully skewed public debate.
I fully expect the scientists to get the blame for this if something catastrophic - like a rapid collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet - happens. "Why didn't you warn us?!?" will be the cry.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
I agree with your trade off. However the difference is small between the outputs generated by each policy. An optimistic scenario is that Aberdeen could keep production at about half of current for five or ten years longer. It's meaningful but not game-changing for Aberdeen; it's irrelevant for anyone else.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
The planet will be fine. Global temps have varied hugely over the millions of years. A bigger concern is the habitats of the species that live here and our own ability to survive. Some greens would rather we didn't, but then I think the world would be a poorer place with no-one to appreciate its beauty.
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
I wonder if that’s what the people on Venus said before the runaway greenhouse kicked off.
Do you genuinely believe that we are at risk of a runaway greenhouse effect?
That’s actually a salient point - most of the time we frame this debate as if the uncertainty in the models only runs in one direction, and there is some evidence that scientists are deliberately tempering their language to make their findings more palatable.
So yes, there probably is a risk, at least as large that the fuss we are making about climate change is overblown.
There is a zero risk of a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect. Earth is simply too far away from the Sun.
But, in general, the scientists have been cautious about highlighting low probability high impact risks because they haven't wanted to be labelled as alarmist, and because the fossil fuel funded lobbying efforts have successfully skewed public debate.
I fully expect the scientists to get the blame for this if something catastrophic - like a rapid collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet - happens. "Why didn't you warn us?!?" will be the cry.
Equally, they will be blamed if disaster is avoided.
Not trying to put a gloss on a disappointing result (Honest!) but what we saw in Aberdeen is what we have been seeing in Council elections for years now;
The SNP starts ahead as the biggest Party but gets overtaken as one by one candidates drop out under STV and then gradually the Unionist vote coalesces around the eventual winner.
Rather than look at vote share and change just compare vote to vote between 24-26;
SNP; -46%, Con; +23%, Reform; -75%,LibDem; -54%, Green -43% and Labour; -87%.
I won’t take anything away from the fact that a lot of SNP voters stayed at home, turnout at 31% was just over half 2024’s 60% or that some might have voted against us in protest but I think the big story is people piling in behind the Tories to beat the SNP.
Not sour grapes or an excuse just accepting an electoral reality: when are opponents are split we win when opposition coalesces…
OUCH!
Peter.
SNP vote is very efficient when they are polling 40% and above, very difficult for any Unionist party to defeat them even tactically if they get above that. When they are down at 30-35% its easier.
What helped Mr Swinney last month was a very weak Labour performance, which helped offset any decline in the SNP vote. There really wasn't much point in a lot of Tories or Lib Dems voting Labour in Glasgow last month, Labour were miles away from winning most central belt seats.
Swinney was also helped by a relatively strong Reform performance in May, which didnt emulate this time. It suits the SNP for team Farage to do well
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
Sanctimonious, much?
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
It's a difficult one this. The pro-extraction arguments make a lot of sense when the UK is importing to consume. The slavery analogy doesn't stand up: yes abolishing it domestically while benefiting from foreign slavery through cheap imports is hypocritical, but unlike slavery the evils of oil extraction are global and in aggregate, not the cumulation of millions of individual tragedies.
On the other hand it's hard to argue this is anything but a tragedy of the commons.
Realistically we have to hope governments continue to support reduced consumption and alternative energy sources, so that hydrocarbons become over time a niche luxury good.
We need oil and gas for a lot more than burning it for energy. Ukraine has shown us that centralised fossil fuel energy generation is a major security risk but that doesn’t mean we don’t need oil and gas for other things.
Extract it and sell it but continue to invest heavily in renewable energy generation.
Regarding North Sea oil... The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
Except tin Scotland here has been a big shift to jobs in renewables.
It;'s also worth noting that the International annual rate of jobs decline in mature oil fields is set at somehwere between 2-4% so from 1980 to 2030 the natural decline would be from about 130k to around 50k on a 2% decline. or roughly where we will are now regardless of Government policy.
That's not to say policies are important but like Basin Collapse it gives a wider context.
Oh and before people say Renewables is the future for jobs....
The decline rate for that isn't as steep but it's still 1-2% so don't expect the 30K figure we are close to now to ever reach the 100k+ of O&G last century.
Even if we get to 60K in a decade it will,as technology improves and efficency increases, head back down towards the 30K over time.
1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.
2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry. "I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."
This could be pun.
A pastiche quiche unleashed.
Canonically, a quiche is a sub-category of flan. Are you from South of Watford?
I am from very much North of Watford. 'Flan' is a word I would never use at all (except in reference to a strange boy at school with the name Flanagan). I find it oddly funny that my very South of Watford mother-in-law uses the word 'flan'. It's an even funnier word than 'quiche'.
I love the story.
My family used to call quiches, flans. And North Nottinghamshire is canonical (this fact is not open to debate).
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
Sanctimonious, much?
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
It's a difficult one this. The pro-extraction arguments make a lot of sense when the UK is importing to consume. The slavery analogy doesn't stand up: yes abolishing it domestically while benefiting from foreign slavery through cheap imports is hypocritical, but unlike slavery the evils of oil extraction are global and in aggregate, not the cumulation of millions of individual tragedies.
On the other hand it's hard to argue this is anything but a tragedy of the commons.
Realistically we have to hope governments continue to support reduced consumption and alternative energy sources, so that hydrocarbons become over time a niche luxury good.
(I was having fun with the slavery/submarine warfare analogy, to be absolutely clear.)
That Reform surge in full after 5 by-elections this parliament.
Aggregate majorities achieved:
Labour 9231 Con 6050 SNP 5178 Green 4402 Reform 6
If tactical voting was obvious in the GE I would put Reforms chances of winning a majority close to 0. It is clear voters are willing to coalesce to prevent Reform from winning, it is less obvious how to do that in lots of constituencies at the moment however. Also in favour is I don't think many voters of any the "establishment" parties are particularly enthused by their own party so will be in a more willing mood to vote anti Reform as their primary objective.
Given Labour have so many sitting MPs, who would be the obvious choice for tactical voters, there's a scenario where anti-Reform feelings lead to another huge Labour majority.
I wonder if it would help Labour for Farage to stick around.
Things are playing out very luckily for a party on 20%. Restore entering the fray and further splitting the right very helpful, as was Farage's decision to put Jenrick and Braverman front and centre. Maybe he could bring JRM and Mandelson into the tent next?
A very good night for the Conservatives and those few of us on here that backed them in Aberdeen from weeks back. The 4/1 a couple of days ago was very generous.
From reading the small focus groups, their votes came from across the board. Disillusioned SNP and Labour voters and Reform switchers and those who would normally vote Conservative but have voted tactically previously. A big majority and 50% of the votes. This is a big win for Kemi and the focus group approved of her, if not sure about the party.
The second in Arbroath was a surprise too.
Backed up with two big council gains in Essex, a regain in Wales, holds X2 in London and a hold in the New Forest, probably their best night in years. A couple of losses in Wales only negative.
Good results for Labour (outside of Scotland), but now it could get messy. Starmer will think the good times are around the corner and will not want to give that up. Does Burnham strike will the iron is hot? Streeting? I think we are in for a long melodrama and higher borrowing will cause problems.
Reform - disaster everywhere. The bubble might not have burst, but it is deflating. Wouldn't be surprised to see them lose their lead in the polls in the coming months.
LD - irrelevant. Green - poor, nearly lost in Lewisham. PC - some good holds. SNP - hardly a big vote of confidence in them.
I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.
Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.
Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.
Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.
Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.
There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours
It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero
North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi
And fuck the planet.
That is simply nonsense
We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come
We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue
Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
Sanctimonious, much?
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
It's a difficult one this. The pro-extraction arguments make a lot of sense when the UK is importing to consume. The slavery analogy doesn't stand up: yes abolishing it domestically while benefiting from foreign slavery through cheap imports is hypocritical, but unlike slavery the evils of oil extraction are global and in aggregate, not the cumulation of millions of individual tragedies.
On the other hand it's hard to argue this is anything but a tragedy of the commons.
Realistically we have to hope governments continue to support reduced consumption and alternative energy sources, so that hydrocarbons become over time a niche luxury good.
I also agree with this. However the difference in practice is minimal between running down UK North Sea and investing to the max because the oil and gas is basically exhausted. It makes a pro-planet choice rather easier than if there still were significant exploitable resources. You could argue that by accident we managed the North Sea rather well given the oil and gas ran out just at the point when the world was moving away from fossil fuels. Whether we managed the revenues well from the boom while it lasted is a different question.
Kemi Badenoch absolutely nails it, politically pitch perfect...
Kemi Badenoch@KemiBadenoch This is a significant result, and I want to start by congratulating @DLumsden_MSP on becoming the new Member of Parliament for Aberdeen South and the newest Conservative MP!
Makerfield was about one man’s job.
Aberdeen South was about thousands of jobs in oil and gas across our country and the future of an entire city.
Yesterday, the people of Aberdeen sent a message on behalf of the whole country. Energy security is national security. They know it is common sense to use our own oil and gas rather than importing it from overseas. They know it is madness to make ourselves poorer, weaker and more dependent at a time when even the government’s own intelligence says we are under threat. The first duty of any government is to keep its people safe. The Conservative Party will always put Britain’s security first.
What makes this result particularly significant is that many people who voted Conservative today have never voted Conservative before. I want to thank every one of them.
Many will have voted for us because they care deeply about Aberdeen and its future. Many will have voted for us because they are sick of the SNP’s shenanigans. Others because they are worried about what Labour’s policies mean for their jobs and livelihoods. Many voted for us because they wanted a strong local champion.
Douglas is that champion. He has lived in Aberdeen all his life. He spent two decades working in the oil and gas industry. He knows this city, he knows its people, and throughout this campaign he brought energy, optimism and a genuine belief in Aberdeen’s future. Wherever he went, he had a smile on his face and a positive message about what this great city can achieve.
The Conservative Party is working to earn the trust of the country again. I am grateful and humbled that Aberdeen looked at the choice before them and decided that the Conservative Party was the party that would fight for families, workers and business.
Thank you, Aberdeen. I will never stop fighting for you. Douglas will never stop fighting for you.
Presume their political markets guy doesn't start work until 9am.
I want to take issue with your lauding of AndyJS on the previous thread. Yes, he predicted the 3 winners but virtually everybody predicted Makerfield & Arbroath correctly and split 50/50 on Aberdeen
His percentage predictions were rubbish though - from memory he had Makerfield and Aberdeen with less than one percent wins. He was about 20% out in Makerfield and Aberdeen wasn't much better. Loads of others predicted Burnham winning comfortably.
If you were betting on the size of the victories, you'd be right. If you were betting on the fact of the victories, you'd be wrong.
Unlike many others, @Andy_JS made measurable and complete predictions at a given moment in time and didn't haver back and forth. That's useful and I can calculate their accuracy. If they are also right then that is a happy accident.
Agreed but it hardly needed staggering insight to predict who would win each seat.
Most of the debate around Makerfield was on the size of the majority and he was dead wrong - he was 0.1% away from predicting a Reform win.
Comments
A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money.
But not counting carbon in imports is standard meteorology in government.
The Arbroath and Broughty Ferry result suggests the Murrell problem is a hill of beans, much as Scottish media would wish otherwise.
Next instalment in Farage's slow descent from the peak...Reform failing to win the Manchester mayoral
The £25 billion is even more egregious because people are accidentally deliberately confusing a cumulative number with an annual one. It’s also convenient that this magical tax revenue won’t materialise for many years to come.
Well done to Makerfield for getting out to vote.
Will their be any change in media alignment?
GB News seem to be utterly committed to being Reform TV with no exit in view since they employ some of them including Farage, but what about press outlets such as the Telegraph or the Express or the Spectator?
From observations of BTL comments, and accepting that it is perhaps largely noise, there is plenty of wild assertion (eg hang SKS from a lamp post) at GB News and the Telegraph, which are not free / open access (Telegraph is subscription, GB News has "featured comments" for those who pay).
To me there is some similarity to the noisy libertarian political bloggers from the late noughties, who used to do things like post pictures of hanging nooses from time to time.
There is nobody whatsoever who claims that there are short term savings from removing the triple lock, literally everyone making the argument is pointing to the long-term implications of the triple lock ratchet. Especially the yo-yo effect of having eg inflation one year causing an increase, then catch-up wages the following year causing the same increase to occur a second time.
Similarly literally any tax or spend change can be denigrated by referring it as a tiny percentage of overall tax and spend. That is true of everything when you do that, which is why you should never do that.
The simple fact of the matter is this is likely to result in tax revenues and won't harm the environment (versus importing and burning oil) so is the right thing to do. Everything else is inconsequential.
We have a proud tradition on the Atlantic Slave Trade which we should now apply to carbon emissions.
0.7% Green, 0.4% Lib Dem
Didn't win in Makerfield, got nowhere in Aberdeen or Arbroath, Tories not dead, lost two Reform council seats with 15% loss of vote share
The sooner we end all use of fossil fuels the better, but what is stupid is not using our own resources in order to polish our halo while using them from elsewhere.
We need to be honest about scale otherwise we will continue to delude ourselves.
At present the cost of legacy infrastructure, pipelines, hubs, inter-connectors are spread over existing producers.
Over time as the cost of upgrading and maintaining it rises and the number of producers fall the burden on each rises and you reach a point where you get rapid decline.
Think of the cost of stamps, the cost of delivery is covered by the number of letters delivered but if email replaces snail mail the cost of each stamp rises until no one will buy stamps.
Denmark has already stopped delivering letters!
Much like Coal we have two choices, the German model; Invest in alternatives in mining areas before you close the mines or the British model; close the mines and struggle to pick up the pieces.
I listen to people talk about opening new fields and it reminds me of Scargill talking about “The cheapest deep mined Coal!”.
It was, but it was far more expensive than open cast from abroad.
I hear the same, “We understand our Industry better than politicians!” and think of all the fishing communities globally that have said “There’s plenty of Fish!”
Right up till the stocks collapsed.
If we don’t transition as widely and rapidly as we can if the next decade we are facing what happened to mining communities in the twenty years from 75-95 when jobs went from 250k to 50k.
Peter.
Understandably, it matters a lot to people involved in the industry. Less respectable, it matters to partisans playing football with the issue. But the importance some are attaching to the issue just shows how frivolous a lot of our politics is.
They will all retreat in moments from and playing with the Far Right as soon as it is convenient to do so.
What the serious centrist media lack at the moment is sufficient editorial positioning that it is possible for them to promote solutions and visions within the realm of the possible. As the FT and Economist did brilliantly some years ago. The centre left New Statesman is woefully bad in this regard. I have no idea where it stands on anything.
Don't know enough about GB News to comment. Does anyone watch/listen?
It could contribute to that.
I don't see anyone saying it will be sufficient on its own.
Eabhal is denigrating the actual numbers by changing them into percentages of GDP, but deflating a number by making it a percentage of GDP does not change the number. Its still billions of revenue.
Interesting James Adams has said he will stand down as a Councillor, there's at least 1, maybe 2 Councillors at Holyrood who have decided not to resign after becoming an MSP so far. less than 11 months left on their term with the next council vote in May 2027.
Move aside for the 2026 Makeirfled by-election.
Starting again from nothing would not be economic.
Supertanskiii
@supertanskiii
“And you don’t like seeing brown faces on TV”
Thangam Debbonaire just spectacularly lost her shit and absolutely battered the living daylights out of Sarah Pochin live on SkyNews (despite England winning their World Cup game against Croatia).
https://x.com/supertanskiii/status/2067770467906121748?s=20
For the umpteenth time, I don’t disagree with the broad policy idea but do take serious umbrage at how it is framed from a fiscal perspective.
Aggregate majorities achieved:
Labour 9231
Con 6050
SNP 5178
Green 4402
Reform 6
Next up LD winnable seat?
The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.
Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.
But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.
f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.
Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.
I wonder if it would help Labour for Farage to stick around.
The SNP starts ahead as the biggest Party but gets overtaken as one by one candidates drop out under STV and then gradually the Unionist vote coalesces around the eventual winner.
Rather than look at vote share and change just compare vote to vote between 24-26;
SNP; -46%, Con; +23%, Reform; -75%,LibDem; -54%, Green -43% and Labour; -87%.
I won’t take anything away from the fact that a lot of SNP voters stayed at home, turnout at 31% was just over half 2024’s 60% or that some might have voted against us in protest but I think the big story is people piling in behind the Tories to beat the SNP.
Not sour grapes or an excuse just accepting an electoral reality: when are opponents are split we win when opposition coalesces…
OUCH!
Peter.
Leaving that bit out, this is the Manchester Evening News piece on potential Mayoral candidates, and I think the Restore UK one Marlon West, if his background is as reported (elsewhere eg Sky News), will animate the election.
And politically it is logical for them to run him.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/next-mayor-greater-manchester-candidates-34143442
Makerfield reminds us that to win you have to unite the left or the right coalition. The Tories and Reform are fighting for the same votes and @williamglenn ’s wet dream of a Tory v Reform duopoly is fanciful at present. The left wont vote Tory in a GE in England especially unless something drastic happens.
Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.
Watch the NEB
We have to get clean.
2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry.
"I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."
Lower taxes, lower spending and less regulation are what's needed to get GDP growth up from 0.5%-1%/year to more like 2-3%.
The deluded are those that claim it isn't, contrary to economic theory and the great weight of empirical evidence.
The exact magnitude of the effects of different policies is important, but a secondary issue to the big change in direction we need. It's also quite difficult to know in advance. But that we need to change direction radically has been obvious for many years now.
His percentage predictions were rubbish though - from memory he had Makerfield and Aberdeen with less than one percent wins. He was about 20% out in Makerfield and Aberdeen wasn't much better. Loads of others predicted Burnham winning comfortably.
Aberdeen is apparently now a morality play rather than a city full of actual people.
A pastiche quiche unleashed.
Canonically, a quiche is a sub-category of flan. Are you from South of Watford?
It is being systematically and expensively removed.
If it is needed again, it will require billions to rebuild.
This is just reality.
We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.
Kemi is clearly seeing the Conservatives make gains in Scotland as well as London where they have squeezed the Labour vote and where Reform are weaker. The Conservatives gain from the SNP in Aberdeen South will be a blow to Swinney only a month after he failed to win an SNP Holyrood majority though some relief for him they still held Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
Bad night for Farage as Reform not only failed to beat Burnham and Labour in Makerfield, a top Reform target seat but saw Restore get 7% of the vote. While Restore did not match Lowe's hype they took enough votes from Reform to almost outweigh Reform gains of Conservative voters in the strong Leave seat
(And the US has insane levels of red tape, which suggests it’s something of a red herring on economic growth)
Indecisive handwringers and the opportunistic can jump about easier.
With the end of the local oil&gas industry (mostly) they pivoted to export. And did quite well.
Note that the engineering skills go far beyond just oil and gas equipment. Think small order, expensive custom products.
Lots of orders from around the world.
They are being decimated by high electricity costs.
So yes, there probably is a risk, at least as large that the fuss we are making about climate change is overblown.
I guess the Holyrood result shields him for a while at least, but maybe not too long.
Higher CO2 will make crops very slightly more drought resistant, but not enough to compensate for the East Asian Monsoon failing.
I wouldn't say billions would die, unless civilization itself collapses, but it would be hard to pin that entirely on global warming. There would be other factors.
There were 750k miners in 1947 and 1.25m miners in 1914.
What did start after 1975 was the big redundancy payments and the landscaping and redevelopment of the old pits and slagheaps.
There was already one sheepish Reform Councillor who has reverted to the Cons, and he may not have been the first. That was Robbie Lammas in Medway, who has a wonderful nearly Prime Ed Balls hairstyle and returned last week.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0npg1vdko
That lets me ask my favourite classic chicken joke: Why did the chicken cross the road and back again?
If you were betting on the fact of the victories, you'd be wrong.
Unlike many others, @Andy_JS made measurable and complete predictions at a given moment in time and didn't haver back and forth. That's useful and I can calculate their accuracy. If they are also right then that is a happy accident.
On the other hand it's hard to argue this is anything but a tragedy of the commons.
Realistically we have to hope governments continue to support reduced consumption and alternative energy sources, so that hydrocarbons become over time a niche luxury good.
But, in general, the scientists have been cautious about highlighting low probability high impact risks because they haven't wanted to be labelled as alarmist, and because the fossil fuel funded lobbying efforts have successfully skewed public debate.
I fully expect the scientists to get the blame for this if something catastrophic - like a rapid collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet - happens. "Why didn't you warn us?!?" will be the cry.
What helped Mr Swinney last month was a very weak Labour performance, which helped offset any decline in the SNP vote. There really wasn't much point in a lot of Tories or Lib Dems voting Labour in Glasgow last month, Labour were miles away from winning most central belt seats.
Swinney was also helped by a relatively strong Reform performance in May, which didnt emulate this time. It suits the SNP for team Farage to do well
Extract it and sell it but continue to invest heavily in renewable energy generation.
Rough decade figures from the 1980's;
80's; O&G 120 -130k, Renewables 1k.
90's O&G 100 - 130k, Renewables 3k,.
00's O&G 100 - 120k, Renewables 3-6k.
10's O&G 80-100k, Renewables 10-20k,
20's O&G 60-70k, Renewables 15-25k.
30's? O&G 30-50k, Renewables 30-50k!
It;'s also worth noting that the International annual rate of jobs decline in mature oil fields is set at somehwere between 2-4% so from 1980 to 2030 the natural decline would be from about 130k to around 50k on a 2% decline. or roughly where we will are now regardless of Government policy.
That's not to say policies are important but like Basin Collapse it gives a wider context.
Oh and before people say Renewables is the future for jobs....
The decline rate for that isn't as steep but it's still 1-2% so don't expect the 30K figure we are close to now to ever reach the 100k+ of O&G last century.
Even if we get to 60K in a decade it will,as technology improves and efficency increases, head back down towards the 30K over time.
Peter.
My family used to call quiches, flans. And North Nottinghamshire is canonical (this fact is not open to debate).
You now of course have to make a quiche for tea.
I will now be having one for lunch.
From reading the small focus groups, their votes came from across the board. Disillusioned SNP and Labour voters and Reform switchers and those who would normally vote Conservative but have voted tactically previously. A big majority and 50% of the votes. This is a big win for Kemi and the focus group approved of her, if not sure about the party.
The second in Arbroath was a surprise too.
Backed up with two big council gains in Essex, a regain in Wales, holds X2 in London and a hold in the New Forest, probably their best night in years. A couple of losses in Wales only negative.
Good results for Labour (outside of Scotland), but now it could get messy. Starmer will think the good times are around the corner and will not want to give that up. Does Burnham strike will the iron is hot? Streeting? I think we are in for a long melodrama and higher borrowing will cause problems.
Reform - disaster everywhere. The bubble might not have burst, but it is deflating. Wouldn't be surprised to see them lose their lead in the polls in the coming months.
LD - irrelevant. Green - poor, nearly lost in Lewisham. PC - some good holds. SNP - hardly a big vote of confidence in them.
Firm Tied to Trump Donor Got No-Bid Contract to Clean Reflecting Pool
Kemi Badenoch@KemiBadenoch
This is a significant result, and I want to start by congratulating @DLumsden_MSP
on becoming the new Member of Parliament for Aberdeen South and the newest Conservative MP!
Makerfield was about one man’s job.
Aberdeen South was about thousands of jobs in oil and gas across our country and the future of an entire city.
Yesterday, the people of Aberdeen sent a message on behalf of the whole country. Energy security is national security. They know it is common sense to use our own oil and gas rather than importing it from overseas. They know it is madness to make ourselves poorer, weaker and more dependent at a time when even the government’s own intelligence says we are under threat. The first duty of any government is to keep its people safe. The Conservative Party will always put Britain’s security first.
What makes this result particularly significant is that many people who voted Conservative today have never voted Conservative before. I want to thank every one of them.
Many will have voted for us because they care deeply about Aberdeen and its future. Many will have voted for us because they are sick of the SNP’s shenanigans. Others because they are worried about what Labour’s policies mean for their jobs and livelihoods. Many voted for us because they wanted a strong local champion.
Douglas is that champion. He has lived in Aberdeen all his life. He spent two decades working in the oil and gas industry. He knows this city, he knows its people, and throughout this campaign he brought energy, optimism and a genuine belief in Aberdeen’s future. Wherever he went, he had a smile on his face and a positive message about what this great city can achieve.
The Conservative Party is working to earn the trust of the country again. I am grateful and humbled that Aberdeen looked at the choice before them and decided that the Conservative Party was the party that would fight for families, workers and business.
Thank you, Aberdeen. I will never stop fighting for you. Douglas will never stop fighting for you.
The Conservative Party will keep fighting for common sense, a stronger economy and a stronger country.
https://x.com/KemiBadenoch/status/2067861410059612497
Most of the debate around Makerfield was on the size of the majority and he was dead wrong - he was 0.1% away from predicting a Reform win.