About time. It’s amazing that these schemes - ubiquitous in Europe and increasingly in all Western metros - are almost absent from the U.K (save London).
This piece from 2019, by CyclingUK, lists dozens of schemes in the UK.
On voter ID, whenever we receive our form from our LA to register we have to sign it, and it clearly states the signature will be checked against the voter return
At the last General Election I had my postal vote rejected because I accidentally put the wrong year of my birth. I was out by one. I put my wife's. I got the letter rejecting it after the election so I couldn't rectify it. I gave myself a slap on the wrist. It could have made a difference but didn't TG.
If only Casino were right and there were "virtually no checks"!
Sorry, I'm not going to let that pass.
My point was that postal votes were ripe for abuse within the households to which they had been posted. It was not that there were "no checks" whatsoever upon their return, but checking off a signature against a voter return provides no evidence of whether that vote has been secretly cast.
I said there should be higher tests for qualifying for a postal vote, and unless there are extenuating circumstances that these should be delivered to and cast in a public place such as a post office or council site.
Of course, you know this, but as pedantic one-upmanship is how you define 'success' in your life you want to re-frame this as "intimidation" rather than "fraud" so you can win a narrow point.
It's sad, Ian. If we're going to disagree - let's disagree on something substantive rather than waste time on trivialities when the substance of the matter here is the integrity of the ballot.
A good point about early voting being preferable to postal voting. One of the few things the USA gets right, is to have ballot boxes in town halls and libraries for a couple of weeks. Make postal voting only for the infirm and people travelling.
About time. It’s amazing that these schemes - ubiquitous in Europe and increasingly in all Western metros - are almost absent from the U.K (save London).
Here in Liverpool we have some electric rental scooters that are now bloody everywhere. I am amazed nobody has found a way of nicking the batteries from them as they must surely be worth a few Bob.
One of the few funny moment of the whole pandemic, was the whinging tennis players in Australia.
They had a rare opportunity in the past year to earn a pile of money, but all they could think about was how horrible it was to be stuck in a 5* hotel for a fortnight.
Hancock on R4 waffled around the social care question: "why aren't you delivering? Johnson said he had a plan etc"
Ended with rather a good speech about how in general "this government delivers" but we are still none the wiser as to when social care will have a plan.
Notable from the discussion was the way he tried to present the Johnson government as completely different from the Tory years before that. As if a new party had been elected frankly.
To be fair, I gather some people in the shires are beginning to think that!
I think this is right. They are a different party with a few old Tory hangers on, in the same way that at least until around 2006 New labour were a different party from Labour.
Step back and look at the current conservative policy suite, and it's a mixture of soft focus populism (let's face it we're not imprisoning dissidents or banning newspapers yet) and super-Keynesian crisis economics. It feels pretty different from what came before.
Exactly. The Conservatives haven't won places like Hartlepool. Johnson's Blue Labour has won them. The old Tories used to be run out of town.
The Tories also lost control of Tunbridge Wells and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire county councils last week and lost seats in Surrey, areas which contain parliamentary seats they won even in 1997 and 2001, mainly due to gains by the LDs.
The current Tory party is more working class than it has ever been and has made big gains from Labour in the North and Midlands but that has come at the cost of losing some upper middle class voters in the South to the LDs
I don't know about Tunbridge Wells and Surry but I do know from friends in Oxfordshire who would normally be Tory that there is a lot of anger about fields being turned into ugly housing estates. Certainly around the Didcot / Abingdon areas, that seems to be the case.
And the LibDems are the NIMBY party. Look at their election literature......
NIMBYism is entirely appropriate in the countryside.
We are, even where I am currently sitting in London Zone 2, a low-rise country.
To paraphrase Yazz, “the only way is up (in brownfield sites)”.
It's really not - the brand new 4 storey flats near us are creating a nightmare on the new estate close to it - as they didn't build enough car parking spaces.
Elsewhere the problem isn't so big as it's masked by people parking in the car park for the local shops.
Parking is always the problem. They build flats in cities, making the assumption that everyone who lives there will only ever take public transport.
Comments
https://www.cyclinguk.org/article/guide-hire-bikes-and-public-bike-share-schemes
Have some vanished?
Thanks for the header.
I'm a little surprised at the fulminating about voter ID and ID cards.
It is, after all, bringing us into line with much of Europe - which I thought was supposed to be a desirable thing.
They had a rare opportunity in the past year to earn a pile of money, but all they could think about was how horrible it was to be stuck in a 5* hotel for a fortnight.