I would hope that USAF pilots never get that tired .
Of course they do. A 391st Strike Eagle crew flew a 15+ hour mission over Afghanistan. That's over 15 hours strapped into ejection seats, releasing weapons, multiple air-to-air refuelling, talking to AWACS, TAC, etc. How tired do you think those two were?
I have hallucinated from fatigue while flying many times. I was once convinced the carrier deck was tree lined on both sides on a night landing.
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
If Boris were to can student loans, they would be again!
If he were to defund the universities and make them become self funding, this would cut down the numbers considerably.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Is that why Leon’s now babbling about aliens? I thought it was just alcoholism.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Is that why Leon’s now babbling about aliens? I thought it was just alcoholism.
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
Very occasionally I still meet a Conservative academic, who never claim or admit to being Conservative of course; tweed jacket, old Cambridge college tie, rimmed glasses, bookshelves heavy with medieval and norse literature, CoE catechist, extremely well spoken, intelligent and reflective etc.
I can't see the Williams review comes as a surprise. The Government has gone for integration over innovation.
There's no such thing as a perfect model. I expect GBR to do better at timetabling and ticketing integration, but it will also - like any large nationalised organisation - play it safe to established methods.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Jezza fulfilling a manifesto commitment.
On top of that, you even had one of his loony left mayors seizing his local airport for the proletariat.
Remember when the Tories kept implementing David Millbands manifesto?
Sounds about right. Not sure why you’re surprised. It’s a basic woodwind principle and we wouldn’t be talking about the organ of King’s. Early organs would just be a row of pipes with keys to blow air through the right ones. This, for example, is a Tudor organ reconstructed from the soundboard of the original which had been used for two centuries as a farm door:
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Jezza fulfilling a manifesto commitment.
On top of that, you even had one of his loony left mayors seizing his local airport for the proletariat.
Remember when the Tories kept implementing David Millbands manifesto?
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
They’re all happy about money being spent on them. Particularly other people’s money.
This has been the secret to populist success down the ages - Nero, Louis XIV, Napoleon III, Trump, Corbyn (nearly) Johnson.
Of course, eventually things go wrong. Just ask Louis XVI...
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
I do enjoy watching boxing, but prefer fighters that get on with it. The inactivity of the current crop of top heavyweights is utterly ludicrous. I suppose at least Joshua fought Pulev in December and we've had a pandemic but Fury and Wilder haven't fought since each other over a year ago.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
Yes, it is curious, it is almost as if printing money to spend on the North has always been Conservative policy, alongside a zero carbon economy, nationalisation, and state subsidy of industry.
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
Very occasionally I still meet a Conservative academic, who never claim or admit to being Conservative of course; tweed jacket, old Cambridge college tie, rimmed glasses, bookshelves heavy with medieval and norse literature, CoE catechist, extremely well spoken, intelligent and reflective etc.
They still exist. But, they are rare.
Do they cycle to Holy Communion through the morning mist?
On thread Labours biggest problem is morale. Reading Quendon Letts in the Times demonstrates that the Party are led by someone in whom there is no confidence. One of the heirs apparent was given a serious working over nay verbal slaughtering by Penny Mordant yesterday so that excludes Rayner. Next in line is Rachel Reeves.....
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
Very occasionally I still meet a Conservative academic, who never claim or admit to being Conservative of course; tweed jacket, old Cambridge college tie, rimmed glasses, bookshelves heavy with medieval and norse literature, CoE catechist, extremely well spoken, intelligent and reflective etc.
They still exist. But, they are rare.
Do they cycle to Holy Communion through the morning mist?
On thread Labours biggest problem is morale. Reading Quendon Letts in the Times demonstrates that the Party are led by someone in whom there is no confidence. One of the heirs apparent was given a serious working over nay verbal slaughtering by Penny Mordant yesterday so that excludes Rayner. Next in line is Rachel Reeves.....
This Tory British Rail revival neatly encapsulates Labour's problem.
The government is failing on our airport terminals and needs to fix the problem today.
Passengers from red list and green list countries queue side by side in poorly ventilated indoor conditions for several hours. Of course the virus and variants will spread between them. It is an obvious weak point in the travel system and therefore a massive risk to the whole economy.
And it is really easy to fix. Govt pays the terminals/airlines whatever is needed to move all red list flights to 3-5 selected terminals across the country, and bars them from elsewhere. Those terminals would not be allowed to process green list flights. The cost of that surely cant be more than tens of millions for the summer, irrelevant compared to the ongoing costs of extended lockdown.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
Yes, it is curious, it is almost as if printing money to spend on the North has always been Conservative policy, alongside a zero carbon economy, nationalisation, and state subsidy of industry.
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
The UK Tesla Gigafactory will likely be churning out cars and batteries before the next election, with thousands of direct high quality jobs and perhaps tens of thousands of indirect ones to support it. And it’s not going to need state subsidy, just a pair of shiny scissors applied to red tape.
This is the kind of investment that will hopefully mean the money printing and state supported/nationalised industries will not have to last much longer.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
Yes, and it is a real problem for the Labour Party. Every economic policy that they advocate is stolen by the Conservatives, and the alternative small state, subsidy removing free market is anathema. Starmer cannot advocate Thatcherism when the Tories have abandoned it.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
Very occasionally I still meet a Conservative academic, who never claim or admit to being Conservative of course; tweed jacket, old Cambridge college tie, rimmed glasses, bookshelves heavy with medieval and norse literature, CoE catechist, extremely well spoken, intelligent and reflective etc.
They still exist. But, they are rare.
Do they cycle to Holy Communion through the morning mist?
Don't you know the difference between your maids and academics? Tsk.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
There are a lot of people who care far more about their party winning (or often the "other" party losing) than they do about whether the state sector should be 38% or 43% of the economy.
For them it is not much different to supporting Liverpool or Man Utd, you claim to support great attacking football, but it is really about supporting us vs them.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Boris brings back British Rail.
Expect a decline in rail passenger numbers from now on.
Well there will be less demand because of hybrid working.
But great to see the end of franchising - a ludicrous system.
The demand patterns are going to look quite different if people live and work further apart, taking only one or two return trips a week.
Fair to say the current model isn’t working, and it might take a few years to work out the travel patterns for a new model to be viable.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
The primary purpose of the Conservative Party is power - by gaining and retaining power it blocks out radicals and allows it to conserve and preserve more.
This has been the case for hundreds of years, and why its the most successful political party in the Western world and can be so flexible in its policy prescriptions.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
The primary purpose of the Conservative Party is power - by gaining and retaining power it blocks out radicals and allows it to conserve and preserve more
The problem is that is not doing that second part. It's only doing the first bit.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's not as dry as I'd like - particularly with fiscal drag and higher corporation tax - but the Conservatives are still committed to market economics, property ownership, havent raised the headline rates of NI or income tax, have cut IHT and are fiscally conservative - looking to still balance the budget by 2025.
What's changed is there's now a higher floor for state spending and a greater state/private partnership in industrial strategy.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
The primary purpose of the Conservative Party is power - by gaining and retaining power it blocks out radicals and allows it to conserve and preserve more
The problem is that is not doing that second part. It's only doing the first bit.
If you believe that there's no difference between a Rishi Sunak Treasury and a John McDonnell one then I have a bridge to sell you.
Every government in history, even Thatcher's, responded to events and got involved where necessary. Running a deficit during the bad times is something that anyone would do, its not a left vs right issue.
Sunak has pledged to put us on a path to restore sound finances post-pandemic, which the left would not be doing.
I spoke out against rail nationalisation on this thread, though its worth noting that they'll remain (as far as I understand it) still more privatised than they were when Thatcher left office.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
You have two belts.
The Organisation that controls belt A says you must fight Joe Slugger The Organisation that controls belt B says you must fight Slow Jogger.
As this isn't the WWE you can't take part in a Triple threat match thus you have to drop one of the belts.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
Each belt has different rules on who you need to fight and when to keep the belt. Fail to meet the criteria, lose that particular belt.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's not as dry as I'd like - particularly with fiscal drag and higher corporation tax - but the Conservatives are still committed to market economics, property ownership, havent raised the headline rates of NI or income tax, have cut IHT and are fiscally conservative - looking to still balance the budget by 2025.
What's changed is there's now a higher floor for state spending and a greater state/private partnership in industrial strategy.
Precisely. The principles are still there, its just stretched going through extraordinarily exceptional circumstances.
I shudder to think what would have happened had McDonnell and Corbyn been in Downing Street during the pandemic. They'd have nationalised everything they could, rather than providing a safety net in the form of furlough.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
The primary purpose of the Conservative Party is power - by gaining and retaining power it blocks out radicals and allows it to conserve and preserve more.
This has been the case for hundreds of years, and why its the most successful political party in the Western world and can be so flexible in its policy prescriptions.
Ironic that the Conservative party has probably 'destroyed' or tried to destroy more than any other party during my lifetime. Some of these were problems that needed addressing, for sure, but I don't think the conclusion that its primary purpose is to preserve things really stands up to even cursory examination.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
Each belt has different rules on who you need to fight and when to keep the belt. Fail to meet the criteria, lose that particular belt.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
You have two belts.
The Organisation that controls belt A says you must fight Joe Slugger The Organisation that controls belt B says you must fight Slow Jogger.
As this isn't the WWE you can't take part in a Triple threat match thus you have to drop one of the belts.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
The primary purpose of the Conservative Party is power - by gaining and retaining power it blocks out radicals and allows it to conserve and preserve more
The problem is that is not doing that second part. It's only doing the first bit.
On national independence, identity, and culture and the environment I'd say it is.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
That would be the obvious way, yes. But since when has obviousness and logic worked in boxing promotion?
Wilder would either want to fight a nobody for the vacant belt, or have it handed to him, so that Wilder v winner is the unification contest - that guarantees him the biggest payday.
Otherwise there could be more politics in the way, such as a winner v loser rematch or one of the orgs taking their belt back.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
Average house price currently over £600,000, with plenty of >£1m houses and even one bed flats selling for over £300k.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
Small correction (for extra Pb.com Pedantry marks.)
Jeffrey & Mary Archer live in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (referenced in the Rupert Brooke poem).
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
Yes, it is curious, it is almost as if printing money to spend on the North has always been Conservative policy, alongside a zero carbon economy, nationalisation, and state subsidy of industry.
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
The UK Tesla Gigafactory will likely be churning out cars and batteries before the next election, with thousands of direct high quality jobs and perhaps tens of thousands of indirect ones to support it. And it’s not going to need state subsidy, just a pair of shiny scissors applied to red tape.
This is the kind of investment that will hopefully mean the money printing and state supported/nationalised industries will not have to last much longer.
Yes, what a lot of people are missing - and it’s the fundamental difference between Conservative and Labour parties - is that the investment that’s coming is mostly private sector investment, creating private sector jobs. Government are mostly creating the conditions for investment then getting out of the way.
That’s obviously in contrast to how the government have reacted during the pandemic, which has been to spend whatever is necessary to solve the immediate issue.
Hmmm......and people were worried about having to deep in with your vaccine passport for the pub....
Holiday 'police' to knock on your door: As hopes rise for full freedom in June, Priti Patel reveals plans for up to 10,000 quarantine checks EVERY day to make sure Britons returning from abroad are in isolation
There is a strong chance that I'm being stupid, but I don't get traveller quarantine post herd immunity.
A traveller can return as one of three states:
1) No covid, no problem
2) With a covid strain unresistant to vaccines, which is no problem.
3) With a covid strain that largely escapes vaccines, which is a problem.
Under current rules the isolation period is shorter than the incubation period, and naturally porous via family members/ some people not isolating properly so no matter how many rona police there are some will escape the net. Lets be *extremely* generous and assume that quarantine/test & release prevents 95% of cases imported going on to infect someone else vs every single imported case infecting at least 1 other person without quarantine.
R of Kentish/Indian Covid seems to be somewhere between 3-6 in a population that largely isn't social distancing and doesn't have rules in place.
Lets give a rough estimate of 1m people entering and leaving the country every week this summer (which is low), and say 0.05% have vaccine resistant COVID (500 cases per week), using the assumptions above all bar 25 of the cases imported per week would be stopped under current rules, only issue is that in one generation those 25 cases (among a vulnerable population) would have a R of ~4/5 (generation 1: 113, generation 2: 506), so at most quarantine buys us 20 days head start.
If a vaccine resistant strain emerges it *will* find it's way in unless we shut our borders completely, so the current isolation rules seem to impose maximum cost while giving us extremely limited benefits.
Because you're viewing it as a boolean state of "its out" or "its in" and if "its in" then there's nothing we can do about it.
If a problem variant comes in then its better to have those cases at a low number that can be suppressed and not simply (at this stage) give up and let it rip.
In March 2020 we were struggling to do thousands of tests per day, now we can do a million plus tests per day. If limited outbreaks occur then surge testing etc can squish it, which isn't the case if its just letting it run wild without a care. 20 days head start is absolutely massive.
If surge testing worked we would have stopped the Indian and Saffa variants via testing, but as a nation we are just far too interconnected for that sort of thing to work effectively.
By the time we're aware that we have a problem with a vaccine resistant strain (which would probably be around the same threshold of cases, so those 20 days are likely misleading), it will be too late.
We have squished the Saffa variant via testing and we have just started testing for the Indian variant in the same way and already case numbers overall are going back down again.
The Indian variant is pretty clearly it hitting an unvaccinated pocket and running out of hosts to spread to (see the limited geographical spread), as for the Saffa strain it's errrr, 0.1% off of it's peak in terms of the proportion of cases sequenced being Saffa strain (as for absolute numbers the previous peak was w/e 27th of March, where 22 sequenced genomes were saffa strain, the last two weeks have had 26 and 22.5(?) saffa strain cases sequenced). https://covid19.sanger.ac.uk/lineages/raw?
Then bear in mind that these two strains are not resistant to vaccines, and consequently any variant largely immune to vaccines will spread far more rapidly, to far more people than those relatively hard to spread strains that we have failed to crush. If a genuinely vaccine resistant strain finds it's way into the UK, unless we catch every case of it basically instantly, it will rip through society.
That's too completely misunderstand vaccine resistance, again it isn't boolean. You're making everything all or nothing, but it doesn't work that way.
A vaccine resistant strain will still have vaccines working, just working less efficiently allowing more infections and more disease, but with vaccines still stopping some infections and some disease. The odds of vaccines ceasing to work at all in one go are quite miniscule.
A superb article on why the fact it was a novel coronavirus to us made such a big thing of it, and why it will not be novel to anyone immunised or who has had it.
I'm wondering how this compares to, say, 1987, which was the most recent other time that the Tories had a majority larger than 50.
Is this simply what you would expect when one party is so far ahead of another in the national vote, or has the Labour vote become so concentrated in the big cities, and therefore inefficient, that there's an actual difference?
Maybe Labour's problem is just to become more popular, and the electoral geography will look after itself.
The nearest the Tories got to winning a seat in Stoke in the 1980's was missing by 5,000 in Stoke South in 87.
The Tories won Nuneaton in the 80's by 5,000 or so. It is now 13,500.
So this level of shift is unprecedented.
I'm not sure it's that unprecedented: seats change and politics change. In the mid 1980s, there were mining villages where the Conservatives would have gotten zero votes.
Now the Conservatives party has changed, as has Labour and as have the villages themselves. And now they may well be Conservative majority seats.
Other seats have gone the other way. Cambridge used to be a Conservative seat. Indeed, many University seats were Conservative.
Very occasionally I still meet a Conservative academic, who never claim or admit to being Conservative of course; tweed jacket, old Cambridge college tie, rimmed glasses, bookshelves heavy with medieval and norse literature, CoE catechist, extremely well spoken, intelligent and reflective etc.
They still exist. But, they are rare.
Do they cycle to Holy Communion through the morning mist?
Don't you know the difference between your maids and academics? Tsk.
And that's exactly the sort of talk that will get you cancelled.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
Small correction (for extra Pb.com Pedantry marks.)
Jeffrey & Mary Archer live in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (referenced in the Rupert Brooke poem).
So, they live in Barton ward, not Trumpington.
Yes, you are right. If you're punting south along the river his house is a little further along.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
To be fair, there's a lot of new housing in Trumpington, which is a data point against the "people in new houses vote Conservative" theory. But the fate of Cambridge Conservatives shows what can happen to parties- ending up with a point where you are not even irrelevant. Hard to see a way back, absent an unpopular Lib-Lab government and the right campaigner in the right place.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
It already is under state control: Network Rail.
From what I have read there are no real changes other than the final vestiges of creating railway professionals being snuffed out. "Nationalisation" gets mentioned. Network Rail was State owned. Franchises were state-owned, let on a fixed contract to a private company who had exclusive operating rights *but not ownership*.
The DfT has been all that is wrong with the "Great British Railways" for the last 10 years or so. It will now have even more power handing out short term contracts with all control sat with the DfT.
Passenger numbers will drop. Not because it has been "nationalised" because passenger rail operations were never privatised. They will drop because Covid has changed how we live and work, and the Treasury is going back to the late BR-period put the fares up to reduce demand model and thus remove the need for investment.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
Small correction (for extra Pb.com Pedantry marks.)
Jeffrey & Mary Archer live in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (referenced in the Rupert Brooke poem).
So, they live in Barton ward, not Trumpington.
My parents nearly bought a house from Jeffrey Archer. But he lied (technically “knowingly misled”) them. So they refused to deal with him
As to trash talk, sometimes it's for show and ticket sales, sometimes there is a beef.
You didn't see AJ rush over to Dillian Whyte in sympathy when he stopped him in their pro fight. Likewise Groves vs Froch was a genuine antipathy. To say nothing of De La Hoya and Mayorga.
Think about joshing with your friends and then one of them slaps you too hard. You get angry. It passes in a moment but for that moment there's fire. Then they say well they could beat you up so get over yourself.
That x 1,000.
But often it's too aid sales (ahem, Floyd vs Mayweather).
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
To be fair, there's a lot of new housing in Trumpington, which is a data point against the "people in new houses vote Conservative" theory. But the fate of Cambridge Conservatives shows what can happen to parties- ending up with a point where you are not even irrelevant. Hard to see a way back, absent an unpopular Lib-Lab government and the right campaigner in the right place.
Not people in the new houses necessarily, but people moving from renting to buying - which may be further down the chain.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
Yes, it is curious, it is almost as if printing money to spend on the North has always been Conservative policy, alongside a zero carbon economy, nationalisation, and state subsidy of industry.
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
The UK Tesla Gigafactory will likely be churning out cars and batteries before the next election, with thousands of direct high quality jobs and perhaps tens of thousands of indirect ones to support it. And it’s not going to need state subsidy, just a pair of shiny scissors applied to red tape.
This is the kind of investment that will hopefully mean the money printing and state supported/nationalised industries will not have to last much longer.
Yes, what a lot of people are missing - and it’s the fundamental difference between Conservative and Labour parties - is that the investment that’s coming is mostly private sector investment, creating private sector jobs. Government are mostly creating the conditions for investment then getting out of the way.
That’s obviously in contrast to how the government have reacted during the pandemic, which has been to spend whatever is necessary to solve the immediate issue.
In this case all the Government is going to do is identify a suitable site 250+ acres and tell the council to keep planning away from it. And given the pain that Tesla is currently suffering in Berlin I also suspect that will be what Elon is seeking more than anything else.
It's also way I don't think the Blyth plan works but that existing plan will be why this ends up either in or new a freeport rather than Blyth which would have been a suitable location...
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Labour have.
They did until 2010, and even now are much better placed than they were back then! As the coalition overhang recedes I'd expect Cambridge to be one of the first seats where they manage to come back.
The government is failing on our airport terminals and needs to fix the problem today.
Passengers from red list and green list countries queue side by side in poorly ventilated indoor conditions for several hours. Of course the virus and variants will spread between them. It is an obvious weak point in the travel system and therefore a massive risk to the whole economy.
And it is really easy to fix. Govt pays the terminals/airlines whatever is needed to move all red list flights to 3-5 selected terminals across the country, and bars them from elsewhere. Those terminals would not be allowed to process green list flights. The cost of that surely cant be more than tens of millions for the summer, irrelevant compared to the ongoing costs of extended lockdown.
I don't see why the Govt (read: taxpayers) need to pay to move all red flights to selected terminals.
Maybe simplistic but if it was up to me I would say that airports can only allow red flights to land into uniquely red terminals - and they need to charge the airlines (and thus the passengers) appropriate amounts to fund that.
If that means that no airport is capable of funding a red terminal, meaning that no red flights happen, then that's the market solving the issue. Red flights are allowed, but they're not happening as they're not cost efficient.
If eg Heathrow decides to repurpose eg Terminal 5, or Manchester decides to repurpose Terminal 3, to be a uniquely red terminal and charges appropriate fees to operate that, then job done too.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
With boxing if you follow the money everything becomes clear. What is sad is that is increasingly so of really important things like cricket.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Is this just a rebrand of Network Rail, or something more?
It’s much more. At the minute, many rail franchises have to run their services using what passengers pay them. They of course price in the implied risk of that.
This takes that away and runs the whole thing via the Government, with companies paid a flat fee to run each service. Structured correctly, if it works, they will then of course be held to account for trains running properly, which is the bit they claim to be good at.
It’s a good idea and the right balance. Can’t possibly have been dreamt up by a politician.
And it gives the public one arse to kick under a unified GBR brand - instead of having several companies with different protocols, brand names and fare structures, blaming each other.
It will be popular.
And it will put more onus on the Treasury to fund the railways, which the Treasury will prioritise Schools N Hospitals, so investment will fall and the railways will ossify and passenger numbers will fall.
Passenger numbers will never recover back to the pre-covid height because the demand to commute long distances 5 days a week has gone. It was proving impossible to meet demand on some routes where you couldn't fit longer trains and no paths for more services. A reduction in bums pressed against partitions will help.
The challenge for the industry is how to remove all the remaining structures of privatisation - still there despite NR having been state owned and maintenance in-house for ages. We can't wire up new routes because Railtrack let all the knowledge and experience go away and Network Rail has its hands tied in ludicrous layers of expensive contracts.
Very little is changing from a passenger facing perspective - perhaps the good franchise names (LNER, gWR, Cross Country, Northern, Southern) will become permanent but thats about it as the DfT have been a dictatorship for a decade anyway. Its the back office side that has to change.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Is this just a rebrand of Network Rail, or something more?
It’s much more. At the minute, many rail franchises have to run their services using what passengers pay them. They of course price in the implied risk of that.
This takes that away and runs the whole thing via the Government, with companies paid a flat fee to run each service. Structured correctly, if it works, they will then of course be held to account for trains running properly, which is the bit they claim to be good at.
It’s a good idea and the right balance. Can’t possibly have been dreamt up by a politician.
And it gives the public one arse to kick under a unified GBR brand - instead of having several companies with different protocols, brand names and fare structures, blaming each other.
It will be popular.
And it will put more onus on the Treasury to fund the railways, which the Treasury will prioritise Schools N Hospitals, so investment will fall and the railways will ossify and passenger numbers will fall.
Passenger numbers will never recover back to the pre-covid height because the demand to commute long distances 5 days a week has gone. It was proving impossible to meet demand on some routes where you couldn't fit longer trains and no paths for more services. A reduction in bums pressed against partitions will help.
The challenge for the industry is how to remove all the remaining structures of privatisation - still there despite NR having been state owned and maintenance in-house for ages. We can't wire up new routes because Railtrack let all the knowledge and experience go away and Network Rail has its hands tied in ludicrous layers of expensive contracts.
Very little is changing from a passenger facing perspective - perhaps the good franchise names (LNER, gWR, Cross Country, Northern, Southern) will become permanent but thats about it as the DfT have been a dictatorship for a decade anyway. Its the back office side that has to change.
They will. The latest analysis shows that growth will continue on the railways, just at a slower rate than before.
You've got to remember a lot of lines are being built/upgraded in anticipation of large passenger growth over 30-50 years.
If people only travel 3 days a week, rather than 5, that growth will still happen - and hence the need for better services - but it will just increase at a slightly lower rate.
Always been regulated in London and run by TfL. Even Mrs T didn’t believe in privatising London buses - thank god. One of the finest bus networks in the world.
No comfort to the rest of us paying £4.50 to travel 3 miles from the nearest stop 1.5 miles away. But we rejoice in your good fortune.
The buses up north are shit. An embarrassment in most cities. I do agree they should be regulated by TFManchester TFNewcastle etc.
Buses in Liverpool are very good. About £16 for a weeks pass. Buses from where I live to the city centre and back no more than 5 minutes apart. Still could do with them being unified under council or government as the drivers terms and conditions are getting worse.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Is this just a rebrand of Network Rail, or something more?
It’s much more. At the minute, many rail franchises have to run their services using what passengers pay them. They of course price in the implied risk of that.
This takes that away and runs the whole thing via the Government, with companies paid a flat fee to run each service. Structured correctly, if it works, they will then of course be held to account for trains running properly, which is the bit they claim to be good at.
It’s a good idea and the right balance. Can’t possibly have been dreamt up by a politician.
And it gives the public one arse to kick under a unified GBR brand - instead of having several companies with different protocols, brand names and fare structures, blaming each other.
It will be popular.
And it will put more onus on the Treasury to fund the railways, which the Treasury will prioritise Schools N Hospitals, so investment will fall and the railways will ossify and passenger numbers will fall.
Passenger numbers will never recover back to the pre-covid height because the demand to commute long distances 5 days a week has gone. It was proving impossible to meet demand on some routes where you couldn't fit longer trains and no paths for more services. A reduction in bums pressed against partitions will help.
The challenge for the industry is how to remove all the remaining structures of privatisation - still there despite NR having been state owned and maintenance in-house for ages. We can't wire up new routes because Railtrack let all the knowledge and experience go away and Network Rail has its hands tied in ludicrous layers of expensive contracts.
Very little is changing from a passenger facing perspective - perhaps the good franchise names (LNER, gWR, Cross Country, Northern, Southern) will become permanent but thats about it as the DfT have been a dictatorship for a decade anyway. Its the back office side that has to change.
Anyone know what's happening with Open Access services? Political relevance- Grand Central London - Bradford via a time vortex runs pretty close to Batley and Spen.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Labour have.
They did until 2010, and even now are much better placed than they were back then! As the coalition overhang recedes I'd expect Cambridge to be one of the first seats where they manage to come back.
Not much evidence of the Cam Lib Dem Revival... The Local Elections showed continuing Labour Gains in Castle, Market & West Chesterton which of course were the old Lib Dem strongholds.
In fact, SKS must be rather regretful that he is not facing a by-election in Cambridge where the Labour tide is still strongly rising.
As opposed to the much dicier (and poorer) prospect of Batley and Spen.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
Isn’t it 90% of people who don’t work in London, get to work by car?
Labour winning Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. The Tories everywhere else. Perhaps there is a size of town or city at which it now becomes Labour. 200,000?
Yes. The current rule in England is simple: Labour dominates in larger urban, BAME and posh/Guardianista seats. Their fourth strength - midland and north towns is vanished or vanishing fast.
Their presence elsewhere approaches zero.
Movers, shakers and commentators all live in non Tory seats in these three Labour categories and treat ordinary real places as odd, or even as jokes. But they are the greater part of England and fully explains the Tory position in seats. Once the fourth group has gone (along with Scotland) there aren't enough seats for Labour to attack.
Anyone who thinks Labour can dominate Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire to replace them will need to take a hard look.
Durham as an area and county is a good recent example. Cumbria another. In 1997 it has 4 Lab and 2 Tory seats. It now has 0 Labour, 1 LD (highly marginal) and 5 Tory. Many of the talking heads don't know it exists or think it is in Scotland.
Only a Blair or a centre left alliance could solve this unless the Tory machine fails altogether. (Which it might)
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Lets take crime as a great example. Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime allowed people to vote if they were the "lets understand why offenders offend" group OR the "string up these scumbags burgling our houses" group.
A pragmatic approach they actually believe in would work. Instead Labour campaign on the evil Tories cutting 10,000 coppers as being why crime is rampant. True! But what would Labour do with those coppers? People in communities literally torn apart by the Tory assault on law and order voted Tory to fix it as they didn't trust Labour's wokeism to tackle their issues.
Labour could win Burton and Walsall but not without the wholesale rethink about their values that absolutely cannot happen under Starmer or any other MP they could chose from. A new Blair - or more realistically a new party is needed.
Always been regulated in London and run by TfL. Even Mrs T didn’t believe in privatising London buses - thank god. One of the finest bus networks in the world.
No comfort to the rest of us paying £4.50 to travel 3 miles from the nearest stop 1.5 miles away. But we rejoice in your good fortune.
The buses up north are shit. An embarrassment in most cities. I do agree they should be regulated by TFManchester TFNewcastle etc.
Buses in Liverpool are very good. About £16 for a weeks pass. Buses from where I live to the city centre and back no more than 5 minutes apart. Still could do with them being unified under council or government as the drivers terms and conditions are getting worse.
And here we have the issue. Some people say they want state control to ensure cheaper tickets, others say they want state control to ensure better pay for the employees.
You do realise that unless taxpayers fund the difference those are two opposing visions. If you want better drivers terms and conditions what will you sacrifice to pay for that? Or do you want the money to come from Schools n Hospitals?
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Labour have.
They did until 2010, and even now are much better placed than they were back then! As the coalition overhang recedes I'd expect Cambridge to be one of the first seats where they manage to come back.
Not much evidence of the Cam Lib Dem Revival... The Local Elections showed continuing Labour Gains in Castle, Market & West Chesterton which of course were the old Lib Dem strongholds.
In fact, SKS must be rather regretful that he is not facing a by-election in Cambridge where the Labour tide is still strongly rising.
As opposed to the much dicier (and poorer) prospect of Batley and Spen.
Seats like Cambridge get lots of attention but that is only because lots of important people live in them, it is close to London, agreeable to visit, and there are only a tiny number of them. If you want to win elections you focus on Grimsby and a couple of hundred seats like it.
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Is that really right?
I know it sounds as though I am making this up .... but one of my Cambridge friends, whose house was plastered with Corbyn posters in GE 2019, is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose 4 children went to Eton.
Treachery or not, he had no difficulty in reconciling his personal life choices with Corbynism++.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
Let's not call it anti car sentiment, let's call it what it is. Anti drivers sentiment.
And ~90% of commuting outside of the cities, and thus voters too, are drivers.
And people wonder why Labour is a cities only party.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
I get the impression that ditching the unrealistic green targets would be very popular outside London. Or at least implementing them by forcing people to stop driving and get their boilers changed when they work fine will be extremely unpopular. I just wonder which country will be the first to break the collective hysteria.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
Let's not call it anti car sentiment, let's call it what it is. Anti drivers sentiment.
And ~90% of commuting outside of the cities, and thus voters too, are drivers.
And people wonder why Labour is a cities only party.
A lot of people on the Left have a fundamental issue with private car ownership because it represents a freedom and independence they can't control.
Always been regulated in London and run by TfL. Even Mrs T didn’t believe in privatising London buses - thank god. One of the finest bus networks in the world.
No comfort to the rest of us paying £4.50 to travel 3 miles from the nearest stop 1.5 miles away. But we rejoice in your good fortune.
The buses up north are shit. An embarrassment in most cities. I do agree they should be regulated by TFManchester TFNewcastle etc.
Buses in Liverpool are very good. About £16 for a weeks pass. Buses from where I live to the city centre and back no more than 5 minutes apart. Still could do with them being unified under council or government as the drivers terms and conditions are getting worse.
And here we have the issue. Some people say they want state control to ensure cheaper tickets, others say they want state control to ensure better pay for the employees.
You do realise that unless taxpayers fund the difference those are two opposing visions. If you want better drivers terms and conditions what will you sacrifice to pay for that? Or do you want the money to come from Schools n Hospitals?
There is a third way (I am Tony and here's your £5). Increase passenger numbers so the buses are more used and you can pay drivers more without raising price per ticket. The question, of course, is how.
Seeing stories on Fury-Joshua et al, am I the only one who finds Boxers engaging in trash talk to be really boring and tiresome? I can't figure out if they mean it, because they get all worked up, which I guess I get but just looks childish, or they just go through the motions as it is part of building a narrative for a fight, in which case it is just childish and boring. Sure, personality is needed to make things more interesting, but I don't know how effective it really is at building hype - wrestling would be the place to go if trash talk is wanted.
They’re all trying to ape Mohammed Ali from 50 years ago - except that most boxers today don’t have the intelligence, wit, or sense of humour to do it like Ali did, so they fall back on rudeness and insults.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
The logical solution for me seems to be that Wilder gets to be first to fight the winner of Joshua v Fury.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
I don’t watch boxing - never seen the appeal of watching two blokes beat the sh1t out of each other
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
Each belt has different rules on who you need to fight and when to keep the belt. Fail to meet the criteria, lose that particular belt.
Ok
Boxing is a soap opera.
The belts all need unification bouts, so they can have another falling out and split, to generate a new round of reunifications for the next generation.
Can someone help me with something I can't get my head around? Boris has a majority of 80. In 1983 Maggie had a majority of 144. Yet Boris won a load of 'Red Wall' seats that Maggie couldn't get close to. So where are all the seats she had that he doesn't?
In 30 years the Conservative vote share has gone from 42% to 12%. Just shows.
Lots of cities used to have a nicer more middle class seat- Bristol West, Leeds North West, Portsmouth South, that sort of place, which was reasonably reliably Conservative. There were similar seats in outer Inner London- Lewisham East and West were classic marginals for decades.
Partly the areas changed- big family houses were converted into flats, so a different demographic lived there. Partly, there has been a drift of educated urbanites away from the Conservatives for decades; Johnson just out rocket boosters under it.
Take Cambridge. A Conservative seat until 1992, and only just lost then. Now there aren't even really any council wards where they are in a competitive second place.
Both Oxford seats were conservative until 1983, Cambridge until 1992 and Bristol West until 1997.
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
Yes, I helped out when the LibDems first took Trumpington ward from the Tories - a ‘posh’ village with many expensive large detached houses semi-detached from the city itself. Where Jeffrey Archer lives. It was archetypal Cambridge Tory territory, never lost by them since the war, with during my student days the Tory typically pulling in twice the vote of the second placed candidate. It comfortably resisted the boom years of the early SDP.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Small correction, Thatcherite unpopularity as in the sleazy Major years!
I still recall to this day the moment it was made known that John Major had been shagging Edwina Currie. I had mixed emotions of being sort of impressed at someone who had seemed so grey and so straight, shocked at his choice and saddened at the revelation and the damage it would do to his charming wife.
Yes, it took Major shagging Edwina for the Tories to lose the ward with the most expensive houses in Cambridge. Twenty five years later with another shagger riding high and the Tories struggle there even to beat the Greens for third place!
.
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Labour have.
They did until 2010, and even now are much better placed than they were back then! As the coalition overhang recedes I'd expect Cambridge to be one of the first seats where they manage to come back.
Not much evidence of the Cam Lib Dem Revival... The Local Elections showed continuing Labour Gains in Castle, Market & West Chesterton which of course were the old Lib Dem strongholds.
In fact, SKS must be rather regretful that he is not facing a by-election in Cambridge where the Labour tide is still strongly rising.
As opposed to the much dicier (and poorer) prospect of Batley and Spen.
Seats like Cambridge get lots of attention but that is only because lots of important people live in them, it is close to London, agreeable to visit, and there are only a tiny number of them. If you want to win elections you focus on Grimsby and a couple of hundred seats like it.
Oh absolutely ... Labour have zero need to do any work on the University seats.
They must hold almost all of them in England, sometimes with very big majorities.
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Is that really right?
I know it sounds as though I am making this up .... but one of my Cambridge friends, whose house was plastered with Corbyn posters in GE 2019, is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose 4 children went to Eton.
Treachery or not, he had no difficulty in reconciling his personal life choices with Corbynism++.
There are plenty of those around but, thankfully, not enough to win an election, even in 2017 with the tide running in their favour and against the worst campaign ever.
A politics in which you general views about society make no sense at all of your personal views about yourself and your family cannot be of any value. The whole 'Toynbee' movement is built on the shakiest of foundations.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Yes, the public sector hates cars and it hates large houses, thinking everybody should be happy with two-bedroom flats, so the planning system is rigged to build them. Trouble is, lots of people aspire to family houses with gardens and decent cars.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
They are doing what the voters want. It's why they get their votes.
By 2019, implementing Brexit was what people wanted. Even many of those who voted to Remain. So what do Labour do? Offer us a Leader of the Opposition who spent 2016-2019 trying to come up with every weaselly way he could to thwart Brexit. Result? Hartlepool...
The Government has had some mis-steps on Covid. But it saved the NHS as a resource to protect the nation. It was there, through the spikes of infection. It protected the private sector as best it could, using the alien-to-us furlough scheme. "Whatever it takes." It meshed the best of Government drive and demand with the best of market delivery to get us the vaccines, then used the public sector to get them in arms.
Result? A mid-term set of council election results predecessors could only dream of.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
Yes, it is curious, it is almost as if printing money to spend on the North has always been Conservative policy, alongside a zero carbon economy, nationalisation, and state subsidy of industry.
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
The UK Tesla Gigafactory will likely be churning out cars and batteries before the next election, with thousands of direct high quality jobs and perhaps tens of thousands of indirect ones to support it. And it’s not going to need state subsidy, just a pair of shiny scissors applied to red tape.
This is the kind of investment that will hopefully mean the money printing and state supported/nationalised industries will not have to last much longer.
Yes, what a lot of people are missing - and it’s the fundamental difference between Conservative and Labour parties - is that the investment that’s coming is mostly private sector investment, creating private sector jobs. Government are mostly creating the conditions for investment then getting out of the way.
That’s obviously in contrast to how the government have reacted during the pandemic, which has been to spend whatever is necessary to solve the immediate issue.
In this case all the Government is going to do is identify a suitable site 250+ acres and tell the council to keep planning away from it. And given the pain that Tesla is currently suffering in Berlin I also suspect that will be what Elon is seeking more than anything else.
It's also way I don't think the Blyth plan works but that existing plan will be why this ends up either in or new a freeport rather than Blyth which would have been a suitable location...
If the windmill blade factory on Teesside is the model, and I think it is as that investment was doing heavy lifting for the Conservatives in the last election campaign, investors can expect substantial direct subsidies from the government as well as big tax breaks including no employer's NICs, stamp duty or business rates as well as capital expenditure being written off undepreciated against tax. The government gets to decide where to put these "Freeports" and will ensure they only go where they support Conservative, not Labour, MPs and mayors.
The curious thing about the Tories implementing UKIP or Labour policies they previously bitterly opposed or spending money like it's water is that none of their traditional supporters seem to care at all. They seem quite happy. Weird.
It's because the Conservatives primary motivation is winning and rubbing their opponents faces in it.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
What is the point of power for if it means doing things that you were against five minutes ago?
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
They are doing what the voters want. It's why they get their votes.
By 2019, implementing Brexit was what people wanted. Even many of those who voted to Remain. So what do Labour do? Offer us a Leader of the Opposition who spent 2016-2019 trying to come up with every weaselly way he could to thwart Brexit. Result? Hartlepool...
The Government has had some mis-steps on Covid. But it saved the NHS as a resource to protect the nation. It was there, through the spikes of infection. It protected the private sector as best it could, using the alien-to-us furlough scheme. "Whatever it takes." It meshed the best of Government drive and demand with the best of market delivery to get us the vaccines, then used the public sector to get them in arms.
Result? A mid-term set of council election results predecessors could only dream of.
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Is that really right?
I know it sounds as though I am making this up .... but one of my Cambridge friends, whose house was plastered with Corbyn posters in GE 2019, is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose 4 children went to Eton.
Treachery or not, he had no difficulty in reconciling his personal life choices with Corbynism++.
I mentioned this before but, in the 2019 GE in Highgate, the bigger the house, the more likelihood of a Corbyn poster.
As a general point, I think people like your friend will have their advisors who will ensure they never bear the brunt of Corbynite policies. As usual, it will be the less well-connected middle class who cannot deploy various schemes to mitigate their losses who would have been the most impacted.
On topic, an interesting article. It raises the question of whether there are any Midlands-specific policies that Labour can adopt. Backing, or at least accepting, Brexit is one. The Midlands is car-dependent, so maybe building more roads? House prices aren't as high as in the south, so housebuilding probably wouldn't work. Embracing the flag has been insincere and embarassing. And regional aid would probably not work either as it's not as deprived as the north (and I imagine the parts that are, vote Labour anyway).
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
Cars are probably a big one.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
I can say with experience that anti-car sentiment is very strong at the top of the public sector and within transportation.
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
I get the impression that ditching the unrealistic green targets would be very popular outside London. Or at least implementing them by forcing people to stop driving and get their boilers changed when they work fine will be extremely unpopular. I just wonder which country will be the first to break the collective hysteria.
I think I've said on here before that the Conservatives are on a hiding to nothing if they think cold homes, no more foreign holidays and bland diets are a vote winner.
We only go green with lots of innovative new technology that enhances choice and makes people's lives better.
Anyone know what's happening with Open Access services? Political relevance- Grand Central London - Bradford via a time vortex runs pretty close to Batley and Spen.
They appear to be left alone. (Great) British Rail(ways) will set *most* fares and timetables which leaves a gap for OAO outfits like Grand Central. And devolved Welsh / Scottish operations will remain devolved. Fare simplication - binning most of the operator specific "competing" fares will be good unless in doing so they abolish the cheap fares! At the moment an operator can set a traffic winning fare - in future that will not be allowed.
A real positive is that they are scrapping all of the absurd contracts around performance. No more "delay attribution" where a team of lawyers first draft cast contracts then charge large fees to attribute delays to a cause who then pay fines to those affected. Bonkers. Whole bonfires of "competition" structures and the costs in running them are expected as "simplification"
What could be interesting is their approach to simplification with regards to its comment that there are too many types of train. The DfT has specified some truly godawful and hugely over-priced under-specced trains (Class 800/801 trains with lower spec than the follow on 802s at double the price, 700s with no tray tables for commuters to work on and a contract that made retro-fitting them absurdly expensive, no legroom backbreaking seats etc etc). The idea that we now let these clowns "simply" the number of types in service is worrying as we'll get a lot more bad trains on gigantic contracts.
Or, they could go back to what we lost with the end of BR. Specify something like a coupling type. Fit it universally. So that train x can shift train y when it breaks down. Instead of train x and y having different couplers or better still the same couplers but fitted at slightly different heights.
Final comment. "Great British Railways". Which is definitely NOT British Rail. Will not have any involvement with railways in Wales of Scotland which are devolved to their respective governments other than infrastructure which is already largely devolved. But we can't call it English Railways. And Bozza is involved so it must be Great. Whatever.
"The government has announced the biggest shake-up in the UK's railways since privatisation in the mid-1990s. The reform plan will see the creation of a new state-owned body, Great British Railways (GBR), which will own and manage rail infrastructure."
Is this just a rebrand of Network Rail, or something more?
It’s much more. At the minute, many rail franchises have to run their services using what passengers pay them. They of course price in the implied risk of that.
This takes that away and runs the whole thing via the Government, with companies paid a flat fee to run each service. Structured correctly, if it works, they will then of course be held to account for trains running properly, which is the bit they claim to be good at.
It’s a good idea and the right balance. Can’t possibly have been dreamt up by a politician.
And it gives the public one arse to kick under a unified GBR brand - instead of having several companies with different protocols, brand names and fare structures, blaming each other.
It will be popular.
And it will put more onus on the Treasury to fund the railways, which the Treasury will prioritise Schools N Hospitals, so investment will fall and the railways will ossify and passenger numbers will fall.
Passenger numbers will never recover back to the pre-covid height because the demand to commute long distances 5 days a week has gone. It was proving impossible to meet demand on some routes where you couldn't fit longer trains and no paths for more services. A reduction in bums pressed against partitions will help.
The challenge for the industry is how to remove all the remaining structures of privatisation - still there despite NR having been state owned and maintenance in-house for ages. We can't wire up new routes because Railtrack let all the knowledge and experience go away and Network Rail has its hands tied in ludicrous layers of expensive contracts.
Very little is changing from a passenger facing perspective - perhaps the good franchise names (LNER, gWR, Cross Country, Northern, Southern) will become permanent but thats about it as the DfT have been a dictatorship for a decade anyway. Its the back office side that has to change.
It's the journey through privatisation that facilitated our railways being saved.
Consider the passenger growth over the last decades, or that our railways are now the safest in Europe.
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Is that really right?
I know it sounds as though I am making this up .... but one of my Cambridge friends, whose house was plastered with Corbyn posters in GE 2019, is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose 4 children went to Eton.
Treachery or not, he had no difficulty in reconciling his personal life choices with Corbynism++.
Viscount Stangate was a tower of the hard left. It isn't where you come from that matters its what you believe. If your friend wants to sign on to the dogma they will welcome him.
Comments
The new Sky studios at Elstree are going to be amazing.
https://www.elstreestudios.co.uk/2019/12/sky-develop-major-new-studio-elstree/
https://www.borehamwoodtimes.co.uk/news/19052056.bam-appointed-build-sky-studios-elstree/
The urban well-educated upper middle classes haven't just drifted away from the Conservatives over the last 30 years: they've detached completely and gone into outer space.
There’s going to be an almighty bunfight over this bout though, with Deyontay Wilder winning his arbitration case to be next in the ring with Fury. There will be an awful lot of money, and possibly even a belt, exchanged to make the big fight happen in August.
They still exist. But, they are rare.
There's no such thing as a perfect model. I expect GBR to do better at timetabling and ticketing integration, but it will also - like any large nationalised organisation - play it safe to established methods.
https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1395082491816468481
@ydoethur ?
https://www.goetzegwynn.co.uk/organ/the-new-wetheringsett-organ/
You can see that it is quite simple. Earlier ones would have been made of wood only.
Modern organs of course are anything but!
This has been the secret to populist success down the ages - Nero, Louis XIV, Napoleon III, Trump, Corbyn (nearly) Johnson.
Of course, eventually things go wrong. Just ask Louis XVI...
Of course, discontent may grow when the bills come in.
He'd then have a shot at winning all 4 belts, not 1. Surely a much bigger payday too.
They laugh at their opposition's principles and continue to remain in power.
The keyboard in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_instrument#History
The Thatcherite right is clearly dead in British politics.
Passengers from red list and green list countries queue side by side in poorly ventilated indoor conditions for several hours. Of course the virus and variants will spread between them. It is an obvious weak point in the travel system and therefore a massive risk to the whole economy.
And it is really easy to fix. Govt pays the terminals/airlines whatever is needed to move all red list flights to 3-5 selected terminals across the country, and bars them from elsewhere. Those terminals would not be allowed to process green list flights. The cost of that surely cant be more than tens of millions for the summer, irrelevant compared to the ongoing costs of extended lockdown.
This is the kind of investment that will hopefully mean the money printing and state supported/nationalised industries will not have to last much longer.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
For them it is not much different to supporting Liverpool or Man Utd, you claim to support great attacking football, but it is really about supporting us vs them.
The LibDem gain took the depths of Thatcherite unpopularity and some energetic campaigning to pull off. It remained a LibDem/Tory marginal thereafter, and the Tories did win it back at least once.
I was stunned to look up the 2021 results recently - in elections when the Tories had a significant national poll lead - to see that the voting figures for broadly the same ward were LibDem 1200, Labour 900, Tory 500, Green 350. Indeed the leading Green actually beat the three Tories, so you could argue they were worse than in third.
Fair to say the current model isn’t working, and it might take a few years to work out the travel patterns for a new model to be viable.
This has been the case for hundreds of years, and why its the most successful political party in the Western world and can be so flexible in its policy prescriptions.
What's changed is there's now a higher floor for state spending and a greater state/private partnership in industrial strategy.
But what i don’t understand is how come we keep having these “belt unification” bouts. Surely once the belts are unified that’s it - it can only happen once and then the winner of the next bout takes the lot?
Or do they just create new belts so they can have another “unification” fight (presumably it makes more money)?
Every government in history, even Thatcher's, responded to events and got involved where necessary. Running a deficit during the bad times is something that anyone would do, its not a left vs right issue.
Sunak has pledged to put us on a path to restore sound finances post-pandemic, which the left would not be doing.
I spoke out against rail nationalisation on this thread, though its worth noting that they'll remain (as far as I understand it) still more privatised than they were when Thatcher left office.
The Organisation that controls belt A says you must fight Joe Slugger
The Organisation that controls belt B says you must fight Slow Jogger.
As this isn't the WWE you can't take part in a Triple threat match thus you have to drop one of the belts.
I shudder to think what would have happened had McDonnell and Corbyn been in Downing Street during the pandemic. They'd have nationalised everything they could, rather than providing a safety net in the form of furlough.
Wilder would either want to fight a nobody for the vacant belt, or have it handed to him, so that Wilder v winner is the unification contest - that guarantees him the biggest payday.
Otherwise there could be more politics in the way, such as a winner v loser rematch or one of the orgs taking their belt back.
Average house price currently over £600,000, with plenty of >£1m houses and even one bed flats selling for over £300k.
Jeffrey & Mary Archer live in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (referenced in the Rupert Brooke poem).
So, they live in Barton ward, not Trumpington.
That’s obviously in contrast to how the government have reacted during the pandemic, which has been to spend whatever is necessary to solve the immediate issue.
https://www.theinsight.org/p/novelty-means-severity-the-key-to
the really expensive wallpaper is now falling off https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9593271/Experts-called-fix-Boris-Johnsons-costly-Downing-Street-decor.html
One of the single largest beneficiaries of the EU was the Universities.
They have all swung strongly against the Conservatives.
Perhaps more of a surprise is that in Cambridge, the LibDems have not really benefitted, despite your pioneering early efforts.😀
Labour have.
But the fate of Cambridge Conservatives shows what can happen to parties- ending up with a point where you are not even irrelevant. Hard to see a way back, absent an unpopular Lib-Lab government and the right campaigner in the right place.
The DfT has been all that is wrong with the "Great British Railways" for the last 10 years or so. It will now have even more power handing out short term contracts with all control sat with the DfT.
Passenger numbers will drop. Not because it has been "nationalised" because passenger rail operations were never privatised. They will drop because Covid has changed how we live and work, and the Treasury is going back to the late BR-period put the fares up to reduce demand model and thus remove the need for investment.
You didn't see AJ rush over to Dillian Whyte in sympathy when he stopped him in their pro fight. Likewise Groves vs Froch was a genuine antipathy. To say nothing of De La Hoya and Mayorga.
Think about joshing with your friends and then one of them slaps you too hard. You get angry. It passes in a moment but for that moment there's fire. Then they say well they could beat you up so get over yourself.
That x 1,000.
But often it's too aid sales (ahem, Floyd vs Mayweather).
Rail services to come under unified state control
"Great British Railways"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858
It's also way I don't think the Blyth plan works but that existing plan will be why this ends up either in or new a freeport rather than Blyth which would have been a suitable location...
Maybe simplistic but if it was up to me I would say that airports can only allow red flights to land into uniquely red terminals - and they need to charge the airlines (and thus the passengers) appropriate amounts to fund that.
If that means that no airport is capable of funding a red terminal, meaning that no red flights happen, then that's the market solving the issue. Red flights are allowed, but they're not happening as they're not cost efficient.
If eg Heathrow decides to repurpose eg Terminal 5, or Manchester decides to repurpose Terminal 3, to be a uniquely red terminal and charges appropriate fees to operate that, then job done too.
Shapps on R4 now, extolling the virtues of "simplification" in running a railway network! Who'd have thought?
The challenge for the industry is how to remove all the remaining structures of privatisation - still there despite NR having been state owned and maintenance in-house for ages. We can't wire up new routes because Railtrack let all the knowledge and experience go away and Network Rail has its hands tied in ludicrous layers of expensive contracts.
Very little is changing from a passenger facing perspective - perhaps the good franchise names (LNER, gWR, Cross Country, Northern, Southern) will become permanent but thats about it as the DfT have been a dictatorship for a decade anyway. Its the back office side that has to change.
So I don't think there's a magic bullet for Labour here, certainly not under Starmer.
You've got to remember a lot of lines are being built/upgraded in anticipation of large passenger growth over 30-50 years.
If people only travel 3 days a week, rather than 5, that growth will still happen - and hence the need for better services - but it will just increase at a slightly lower rate.
Political relevance- Grand Central London - Bradford via a time vortex runs pretty close to Batley and Spen.
For years now all Labour wants to talk about are the railways. In one way the Tories sorting out the railways may be self-harming politically, since the more Labour talks about railways, the more Labour is just talking to them in cities.
If you drive around, but one party only wants to talk about public transport and acts like the very notion of driving is evil, then what does that say about what that party thinks about you?
In fact, SKS must be rather regretful that he is not facing a by-election in Cambridge where the Labour tide is still strongly rising.
As opposed to the much dicier (and poorer) prospect of Batley and Spen.
Their presence elsewhere approaches zero.
Movers, shakers and commentators all live in non Tory seats in these three Labour categories and treat ordinary real places as odd, or even as jokes. But they are the greater part of England and fully explains the Tory position in seats. Once the fourth group has gone (along with Scotland) there aren't enough seats for Labour to attack.
Anyone who thinks Labour can dominate Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire to replace them will need to take a hard look.
Durham as an area and county is a good recent example. Cumbria another. In 1997 it has 4 Lab and 2 Tory seats. It now has 0 Labour, 1 LD (highly marginal) and 5 Tory. Many of the talking heads don't know it exists or think it is in Scotland.
Only a Blair or a centre left alliance could solve this unless the Tory machine fails altogether. (Which it might)
The Tories have won all these seats and kept their traditional southern seats because they are the OR party. You can vote Tory - and be welcomed doing so - if you support this or this or this or that. Labour absolutely could copy this and reconnect with their former hinterlands but only if they drop the zealotry and absolutism.
Its impossible for millions of Labour voters to vote Labour - despite liking some of their policies - because they can't agree to this AND this AND this and in disagreeing with part of it they aren't a class traitor or sell out.
Lets take crime as a great example. Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime allowed people to vote if they were the "lets understand why offenders offend" group OR the "string up these scumbags burgling our houses" group.
A pragmatic approach they actually believe in would work. Instead Labour campaign on the evil Tories cutting 10,000 coppers as being why crime is rampant. True! But what would Labour do with those coppers? People in communities literally torn apart by the Tory assault on law and order voted Tory to fix it as they didn't trust Labour's wokeism to tackle their issues.
Labour could win Burton and Walsall but not without the wholesale rethink about their values that absolutely cannot happen under Starmer or any other MP they could chose from. A new Blair - or more realistically a new party is needed.
You do realise that unless taxpayers fund the difference those are two opposing visions. If you want better drivers terms and conditions what will you sacrifice to pay for that? Or do you want the money to come from Schools n Hospitals?
Part of that is self-interest, of course. The latest is to major on the fact that electric cars will still be very bad for pollution due to the Oslo Effect of tyre and brake friction particulates and road dust emissions; tail pipe gas being only about 50-60% of it.
I know it sounds as though I am making this up .... but one of my Cambridge friends, whose house was plastered with Corbyn posters in GE 2019, is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose 4 children went to Eton.
Treachery or not, he had no difficulty in reconciling his personal life choices with Corbynism++.
And ~90% of commuting outside of the cities, and thus voters too, are drivers.
And people wonder why Labour is a cities only party.
Boxing is a soap opera.
The belts all need unification bouts, so they can have another falling out and split, to generate a new round of reunifications for the next generation.
A little more violent than Pro Wrestling, though.
They must hold almost all of them in England, sometimes with very big majorities.
A politics in which you general views about society make no sense at all of your personal views about yourself and your family cannot be of any value. The whole 'Toynbee' movement is built on the shakiest of foundations.
By 2019, implementing Brexit was what people wanted. Even many of those who voted to Remain. So what do Labour do? Offer us a Leader of the Opposition who spent 2016-2019 trying to come up with every weaselly way he could to thwart Brexit. Result? Hartlepool...
The Government has had some mis-steps on Covid. But it saved the NHS as a resource to protect the nation. It was there, through the spikes of infection. It protected the private sector as best it could, using the alien-to-us furlough scheme. "Whatever it takes." It meshed the best of Government drive and demand with the best of market delivery to get us the vaccines, then used the public sector to get them in arms.
Result? A mid-term set of council election results predecessors could only dream of.
As a general point, I think people like your friend will have their advisors who will ensure they never bear the brunt of Corbynite policies. As usual, it will be the less well-connected middle class who cannot deploy various schemes to mitigate their losses who would have been the most impacted.
We only go green with lots of innovative new technology that enhances choice and makes people's lives better.
A real positive is that they are scrapping all of the absurd contracts around performance. No more "delay attribution" where a team of lawyers first draft cast contracts then charge large fees to attribute delays to a cause who then pay fines to those affected. Bonkers. Whole bonfires of "competition" structures and the costs in running them are expected as "simplification"
What could be interesting is their approach to simplification with regards to its comment that there are too many types of train. The DfT has specified some truly godawful and hugely over-priced under-specced trains (Class 800/801 trains with lower spec than the follow on 802s at double the price, 700s with no tray tables for commuters to work on and a contract that made retro-fitting them absurdly expensive, no legroom backbreaking seats etc etc). The idea that we now let these clowns "simply" the number of types in service is worrying as we'll get a lot more bad trains on gigantic contracts.
Or, they could go back to what we lost with the end of BR. Specify something like a coupling type. Fit it universally. So that train x can shift train y when it breaks down. Instead of train x and y having different couplers or better still the same couplers but fitted at slightly different heights.
Final comment. "Great British Railways". Which is definitely NOT British Rail. Will not have any involvement with railways in Wales of Scotland which are devolved to their respective governments other than infrastructure which is already largely devolved. But we can't call it English Railways. And Bozza is involved so it must be Great. Whatever.
Consider the passenger growth over the last decades, or that our railways are now the safest in Europe.