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.
If Corbyn had won, I am sure my friend would have been running the Social Justice Commission. He would be an enthusiastic advocate of de-Kulakisation.
Perhaps I could have helped him, plenty of jobs for functionnaires ? 😉
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
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...
Manston, no longer being needed as a Brexit emergency resource, would be a handy point for delivery into the EU...
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.
If Corbyn had won, I am sure my friend would have been running the Social Justice Commission. He would be an enthusiastic advocate of de-Kulakisation.
Perhaps I could have helped him, plenty of jobs for functionnaires ? 😉
I am sure you would have done a splendid job
Not many Kulaks in Highgate though, they tend to be more in Crouch End....!
"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.
Define "saved". Intercity was the only profitable long distance rail operator in the world. It didn't need to be saved. It needed to be spun off at arms length to keep doing what it was doing so well.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
"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
So does this mean they will scrap the bloated behemoth that is HS2?
It is perhaps no surprise that a party and its supporters should start to reflect the philosophy of the the leader. In the case of Boris, a man famously in it for himself, unashamedly free of beliefs and prepared to affect a persona to ingratiate himself with whoever can get him an advantage, we are seeing the same strands of thought in the party he leads.
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.
Its primary purpose is to conserve the Conservative party.
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.
Morning all. A bit later than usual, but bad things happen now and then. Nothing major, just inconvenient.
In N. Essex buses largely run along main roads, creating a fan system. To get to the next communities 5 miles N or 3 miles S without one's own transport one has either to walk, often along road with some at least heavy lorries, or go ten miles to the outskirts of Colchester, and get another bus to the desired destination. Why do we have to have retired Routemasters, not 16 or so seaters running between smaller communities.
What model the railways are run on is of far less significance than how our politicians view the value of subsidy. Whether in private or in public hands, the railways need a lot of subsidy to operate. Pre-COVID:
Fare income: c.£10bn Subsidy: c.£5bn
During 2020-21:
Fare income: c.£3bn Subsidy: c.£12bn
For sure there will be a recovery post-COVID, but the days of mass commuting are probably over. The TfL model gives power to the politicians and civil servants. It's on them to decide what to fund.
Oh yeah, whilst building a £100bn new railway.
And I agree that the media banging on about trains is a turn-off for the vast majority who rarely use them.
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.
Thatcher wept.
Thatcher wept the day she was removed from office. For doing what the voter's DIDN'T want - the poll tax.
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...
Manston, no longer being needed as a Brexit emergency resource, would be a handy point for delivery into the EU...
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.
I know we've bumped heads on this before, but largely agree with each other, but I don't think its party policy either.
Climate change will be dealt with like the vaccines - invest in innovative technology to make the problem go away.
I do think some, especially junior, Ministers get carried away with it and venture onto bollocks like veganism and other crap like that. Never going to happen, nor should it.
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.
Morning all. A bit later than usual, but bad things happen now and then. Nothing major, just inconvenient.
In N. Essex buses largely run along main roads, creating a fan system. To get to the next communities 5 miles N or 3 miles S without one's own transport one has either to walk, often along road with some at least heavy lorries, or go ten miles to the outskirts of Colchester, and get another bus to the desired destination. Why do we have to have retired Routemasters, not 16 or so seaters running between smaller communities.
Locally the buses no longer turn around in the town centre (mainly because we no longer have a bus station) - now they start off at one side of town and continue on to the other side of town.
That seems to have improved cross town transport a bit but it only helps if the bus is heading to the village you want on the other side of town otherwise you still need to switch in the middle.
The simple fact is most companies are now based out of town but buses are designed to take people into the town centre as that was where offices were 30 years 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.
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.
Thatcher wept.
Thatcher was a transformative realist, not the idealistic extremist painted by extreme left and extreme right caricatures.
She was prepared to run deficits were necessary. The Post Office, Royal Mail and even the railways will still be more privatised than when she left office too.
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.
Yes it's why every announcement of tech that can win the climate change war rather than ridiculous lifestyle changes are met with scepticism by the loony bin Greens. The turning point will be when commercially viable tech that removes CO2 from the air and makes a useful substance from it becomes available in the next 5 years. Once atmospheric CO2 begins to have real value the private sector will pile in to extract it and eventually it will become a fairly important industry. That's the tech revolution we, as a nation, need to be at the forefront of, not bowing down to Green mentalists who want everyone to live in caves.
"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
So does this mean they will scrap the bloated behemoth that is HS2?
Fat chance. That is part of "levelling up". Perhaps the removal of the supposedly competitive structure might remove some of the bloat. But this country has a long and proud tradition of screwing up infrastructure projects and leaving them vastly over budget and incomplete - or scrapped completely. Why should HS2 be any different?
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've seen the forcing people to "get their boilers changed when they work fine" thing a few times, but I've never seen any evidence that this is policy for any government/party anywhere. What's talked about is ending installation of new gas boilers from date X, but that's not the same thing at all. If that happens, then people will keep their existing boilers until they fail (as they do now) and when they fail the replacement will be (for most - as switching to heat pumps or solar thermal will be uneconomic for most retro-fits) a drop-in electric replacement.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
On HS2: if it's completed from London to Birmingham and not from Birmingham to Leeds people up here will be pissed off. A fortune spent, but not here.
Back when I still watched news regularly, local news typically had HS2 stories along the lines of people being worried it wouldn't happen or wouldn't go near them and they'd miss out on better transport links.
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
Derby North is already Conservative!
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
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.
Morning all. A bit later than usual, but bad things happen now and then. Nothing major, just inconvenient.
In N. Essex buses largely run along main roads, creating a fan system. To get to the next communities 5 miles N or 3 miles S without one's own transport one has either to walk, often along road with some at least heavy lorries, or go ten miles to the outskirts of Colchester, and get another bus to the desired destination. Why do we have to have retired Routemasters, not 16 or so seaters running between smaller communities.
Locally the buses no longer turn around in the town centre (mainly because we no longer have a bus station) - now they start off at one side of town and continue on to the other side of town.
That seems to have improved cross town transport a bit but it only helps if the bus is heading to the village you want on the other side of town otherwise you still need to switch in the middle.
The simple fact is most companies are now based out of town but buses are designed to take people into the town centre as that was where offices were 30 years ago.
If only there were a vehicle that could conveniently carry 1 to 5 people from any Place A, to any Place B, on the road network. Going directly or via any stops the vehicles inhabitants wanted.
Out of town premises could even have space for these vehicles to remain parked while waiting for the inhabitants to want to get back into the vehicles and go directly somewhere else too.
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.
I would be fine with that too. But every day whilst your government dithers and simply refuses to either mandate or pay for quarantine to mean quarantine, not hours of mixed queueing between red and green in cramped poorly ventilated terminals, increases the chances of weeks of extra restrictions on everyone. They need to act today, it is frankly irrelevant who pays the bill.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
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.
I don't go for the class traitor nonsense either way (working, middle or upper). You have no choice about the family you're born into or the society around you as you grow up. You do your best for yourself and your family. If you disagree with the way society is structured, you also contribute time and money to trying to help change it. If that will make you less well off, you should take that on the chin if you're sincere about what you think society should be like.
I come from a fairly posh background - parents presented at court, earls and generals and so on in the family - I neither apologise for them nor normally boast of them, they're nice people who also didn't choose their background, and if they were assembly line workers that'd be fine too. I've been lucky enough to have a good career with a series of well-paid jobs in the private sector, a spell in Parliament and two single-person businesses. I still work 10+ hours a day. I would like to live in a society in which background didn't matter and we all paid more tax in return for good social security and public service network. In the meantime, I do what I can to succeed in the current society and I give away a lot of money.
What's wrong with that? You might disagree, but do I have to fail in my personal life in order to want Britain to change?
"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.
Define "saved". Intercity was the only profitable long distance rail operator in the world. It didn't need to be saved. It needed to be spun off at arms length to keep doing what it was doing so well.
Improved performance, increased traffic, increased investment will do for a start.
The one we are light on is use of railways for freight, perhaps.
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.
Yet another outing for the old 'wealthy people can't be left wing unless they're hypocritical phonies' trope.
This is a twist on the politics of envy. What it's actually saying is the following -
"Look, you're rich, good for you, but don't go pretending you're morally superior as well. You can have your cake or you can eat it. Not both."
It's a close relation to something I came across in the City. People being pissed off that traders were allowed to wear casual clothes for work. Sentiment being, "If you're gonna get paid stupid sums for operating a glorified call centre, least you can do is have to struggle into a suit and tie every day. Tosspots."
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
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.
Once one pedal driving becomes normalised in BEVs (which it will be) then 50-70% of braking effort is by regen not disc/caliper. I can tell Mrs DA's electric car hardly ever uses its "real" brakes because when I clean the wheels there is very little brake pad dust (which turns red when you hit it with the Sonax).
It is heavy on tyres though. She got about 15,000 miles from her first set but I reckon if it were my daily I could roast a set off it in well under 10k.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
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.
What Conservative voters largely want is for Labour not to be in power.
There is certainly a gap in the market for the Thatcherite right, and that particular agenda is not being advanced much at the moment. But in amongst the joy and relief of Corbyn not being our PM, and of being free of the stasis of the May era, the qualms that the country isn't being quite as free market as some might like will be fairly muted.
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've seen the forcing people to "get their boilers changed when they work fine" thing a few times, but I've never seen any evidence that this is policy for any government/party anywhere. What's talked about is ending installation of new gas boilers from date X, but that's not the same thing at all. If that happens, then people will keep their existing boilers until they fail (as they do now) and when they fail the replacement will be (for most - as switching to heat pumps or solar thermal will be uneconomic for most retro-fits) a drop-in electric replacement.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
Did you see the microwave based boiler concept earlier this year? I think that's going to be the solution as its price competitive and slots into existing spaces. Over 10-15 years the existing stock of gas boilers will naturally get replaced so there's no need to get people to change early or pay extortionate prices for air or ground based heat pump systems.
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.
Yes it's why every announcement of tech that can win the climate change war rather than ridiculous lifestyle changes are met with scepticism by the loony bin Greens. The turning point will be when commercially viable tech that removes CO2 from the air and makes a useful substance from it becomes available in the next 5 years. Once atmospheric CO2 begins to have real value the private sector will pile in to extract it and eventually it will become a fairly important industry. That's the tech revolution we, as a nation, need to be at the forefront of, not bowing down to Green mentalists who want everyone to live in caves.
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.
I don't go for the class traitor nonsense either way (working, middle or upper). You have no choice about the family you're born into or the society around you as you grow up. You do your best for yourself and your family. If you disagree with the way society is structured, you also contribute time and money to trying to help change it. If that will make you less well off, you should take that on the chin if you're sincere about what you think society should be like.
I come from a fairly posh background - parents presented at court, earls and generals and so on in the family - I neither apologise for them nor normally boast of them, they're nice people who also didn't choose their background, and if they were assembly line workers that'd be fine too. I've been lucky enough to have a good career with a series of well-paid jobs in the private sector, a spell in Parliament and two single-person businesses. I still work 10+ hours a day. I would like to live in a society in which background didn't matter and we all paid more tax in return for good social security and public service network. In the meantime, I do what I can to succeed in the current society and I give away a lot of money.
What's wrong with that? You might disagree, but do I have to fail in my personal life in order to want Britain to change?
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
"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.
Yes...there are actually quite a few Labour pledges being delivered, from the magic money tree support for furlough to rail nationalisation to accelerated housebuilding to subsidies for industry to diverse greenery to an interesting animal welfare strategy. I'm a Labour loyalist, but I can't say I feel especially anti-Government at the moment. If the Tories want to deliver Corbynism, it would be churlish to grumble.
Feeling likewise. The unabashed grift and open mendacity are the only things that grate tbh.
So he’s delivering the totality of Corbynism?
Still got a few Corbyn promises to deliver but getting there. My Tory friends are a little taken aback by it all. As Jonathan says, Thatcherism appears to be really as dead under Johnson as Marxism was under Blair.
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've seen the forcing people to "get their boilers changed when they work fine" thing a few times, but I've never seen any evidence that this is policy for any government/party anywhere. What's talked about is ending installation of new gas boilers from date X, but that's not the same thing at all. If that happens, then people will keep their existing boilers until they fail (as they do now) and when they fail the replacement will be (for most - as switching to heat pumps or solar thermal will be uneconomic for most retro-fits) a drop-in electric replacement.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
Did you see the microwave based boiler concept earlier this year? I think that's going to be the solution as its price competitive and slots into existing spaces. Over 10-15 years the existing stock of gas boilers will naturally get replaced so there's no need to get people to change early or pay extortionate prices for air or ground based heat pump systems.
Yep. I never really saw anything that explained the benefits over more traditional electric boilers, but I guess it's about being able to dump more energy into water more quickly without a big (expensive and point of failure) heat exchanger?
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've seen the forcing people to "get their boilers changed when they work fine" thing a few times, but I've never seen any evidence that this is policy for any government/party anywhere. What's talked about is ending installation of new gas boilers from date X, but that's not the same thing at all. If that happens, then people will keep their existing boilers until they fail (as they do now) and when they fail the replacement will be (for most - as switching to heat pumps or solar thermal will be uneconomic for most retro-fits) a drop-in electric replacement.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
Did you see the microwave based boiler concept earlier this year? I think that's going to be the solution as its price competitive and slots into existing spaces. Over 10-15 years the existing stock of gas boilers will naturally get replaced so there's no need to get people to change early or pay extortionate prices for air or ground based heat pump systems.
Yep. I never really saw anything that explained the benefits over more traditional electric boilers, but I guess it's about being able to dump more energy into water more quickly without a big (expensive and point of failure) heat exchanger?
The thing with gas it is powerful. You can switch a boiler on when it gets cold and within a minute or two you go from cold water in the boiler to powerful heat coming from your radiators. Its almost as quick as switching the lights on.
I haven't got much experience with modern electric replacements, most prior electric ones that I've worked with are really crap in comparison though. They take much longer to warm up and get going which is not good when you're cold.
If they can be cost-efficient, and as good quality, as gas then great. Why not go for it? If they're a crappy alternative that leaves you cold for half an hour while it warms up then no thanks.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
"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.
Yes...there are actually quite a few Labour pledges being delivered, from the magic money tree support for furlough to rail nationalisation to accelerated housebuilding to subsidies for industry to diverse greenery to an interesting animal welfare strategy. I'm a Labour loyalist, but I can't say I feel especially anti-Government at the moment. If the Tories want to deliver Corbynism, it would be churlish to grumble.
Feeling likewise. The unabashed grift and open mendacity are the only things that grate tbh.
So he’s delivering the totality of Corbynism?
Still got a few Corbyn promises to deliver but getting there. My Tory friends are a little taken aback by it all. As Jonathan says, Thatcherism appears to be really as dead under Johnson as Marxism was under Blair.
Yes, there's still stuff in the pipeline. State Investment Bank. Industrial Policy. Subsidized Broadband. And then of course the jewel in the crown - big tax rises, which I think we'll have to wait for external factors to force upon them. Looking good though.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
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.
Yet another outing for the old 'wealthy people can't be left wing unless they're hypocritical phonies' trope.
This is a twist on the politics of envy. What it's actually saying is the following -
"Look, you're rich, good for you, but don't go pretending you're morally superior as well. You can have your cake or you can eat it. Not both."
It's a close relation to something I came across in the City. People being pissed off that traders were allowed to wear casual clothes for work. Sentiment being, "If you're gonna get paid stupid sums for operating a glorified call centre, least you can do is have to struggle into a suit and tie every day. Tosspots."
Shame is often those rich, public schoolboys who vote Labour, James O’Brien springs to mind, point & guffaw at working class Leave/UKIP/Tories saying “They’re literally voting to make themselves poorer!!” whilst voting to make themselves poorer and thinking it a virtue
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
Derby North is already Conservative!
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
Nottingham has all three relevant effects: urban, BAME, academia/Guardianista.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I live in a rented one-bedroom cottage. Some more space would be nice but it's basically fine. People exaggerate the virtues of sprawling properties unless you have lots of kids - it's more important to have a decent place and security of tenure, and I count my blessings and see no need to spend more on myself where there are others with more urgent needs. That doesn't mean being fanatically austere - I go on holiday once a year in normal times, eat nice food, etc. Essentially I'd like to live in a society where we all had a basically good life, and in its absence I try to help change it while living a pleasant personal life.
"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.
Define "saved". Intercity was the only profitable long distance rail operator in the world. It didn't need to be saved. It needed to be spun off at arms length to keep doing what it was doing so well.
Improved performance, increased traffic, increased investment will do for a start.
The one we are light on is use of railways for freight, perhaps.
Performance, traffic and investment were held back by government policy. Had Intercity been spun out into a StateCo as all the other major European networks had been, lets consider the differences we could have seen.
When you take an efficient model - sectorised BR - and throw the 5x subsidy post privatisation at it - think what could have been achieved? Ownership really isn't my issue - there will be more direct control of GBR than there ever was over BR. Its results. And nearly 3 decades down the line of a botched experiment we're back to where we were.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
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've seen the forcing people to "get their boilers changed when they work fine" thing a few times, but I've never seen any evidence that this is policy for any government/party anywhere. What's talked about is ending installation of new gas boilers from date X, but that's not the same thing at all. If that happens, then people will keep their existing boilers until they fail (as they do now) and when they fail the replacement will be (for most - as switching to heat pumps or solar thermal will be uneconomic for most retro-fits) a drop-in electric replacement.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
Did you see the microwave based boiler concept earlier this year? I think that's going to be the solution as its price competitive and slots into existing spaces. Over 10-15 years the existing stock of gas boilers will naturally get replaced so there's no need to get people to change early or pay extortionate prices for air or ground based heat pump systems.
Yep. I never really saw anything that explained the benefits over more traditional electric boilers, but I guess it's about being able to dump more energy into water more quickly without a big (expensive and point of failure) heat exchanger?
I guess it's solid state and will be more efficient, plus it will stand up to hard water areas a lot better than any immersion based heating.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Yep. A change from the Labour government. Yes, the Tories have been in office not Labour. But when local Labour have no ideas and no vision for anything beyond "its the Tories fault" its easy for black to become white and people vote for an 11 year old government to deliver change against 11 years of local decline.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Eh? Why not? Moving 50-odd people even by quite a polluting bus has got to be less polluting than 45 electric cars. But buses are increasingly clean. Most round here are electric.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
Derby North is already Conservative!
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
Nottingham has all three relevant effects: urban, BAME, academia/Guardianista.
Nottingham North, however, is neither BAME nor Guardianista. It's very WWC. Perhaps there's an adjacency effect? The other two are all three, to varying extents.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Eh? Why not? Moving 50-odd people even by quite a polluting bus has got to be less polluting than 45 electric cars. But buses are increasingly clean. Most round here are electric.
There's 67 million people in this country who need to get about, 80% of whom nation wide get about in cars. About 90% outside of cities.
Buses are gestures big-picture wise for the environment. Getting the cars clean will clean up the environment infinitely more because we don't have 50 people needing to move around, we have tens of millions.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Yep. A change from the Labour government. Yes, the Tories have been in office not Labour. But when local Labour have no ideas and no vision for anything beyond "its the Tories fault" its easy for black to become white and people vote for an 11 year old government to deliver change against 11 years of local decline.
Alternatively a vote for change from the failed representation that Hartlepool MPs have done for Hartlepool.
Hartlepool has voted consistently for Labour MPs for longer than I've been alive, longer than many voters in Hartlepool have been alive. What have they done to further the interests of Hartlepudlians in that time?
Why vote for another Labour MP who won't do anything for the area, rather than change and vote for a Tory for a change that will do something for the area? 🤔
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Yes but downthread we have CR saying the essence of the tory party is to keep radicals out. The Tory party is quite schizophrenic, and gets people to believe it is radical if they want radical, and others to believe it is keeping the radicals out if they don't want radical. It is intriguing how long they can keep the charade going.
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I live in a rented one-bedroom cottage. Some more space would be nice but it's basically fine. People exaggerate the virtues of sprawling properties unless you have lots of kids - it's more important to have a decent place and security of tenure, and I count my blessings and see no need to spend more on myself where there are others with more urgent needs. That doesn't mean being fanatically austere - I go on holiday once a year in normal times, eat nice food, etc. Essentially I'd like to live in a society where we all had a basically good life, and in its absence I try to help change it while living a pleasant personal life.
So your cottage I assume has space?
Were many cottages with space like yours in the "social housing" you authorised in the Council after boasting about cancelling building good homes for people to live in?
I'd like to live in a society where we all have a good life too. That doesn't mean cramming the plebs into "social housing" while keeping the space for yourself away from them. That means everyone having the opportunity to have a good home, which means having as many good homes as there are households.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
More streets means more space dedicated to cars instead of the things people actually want - shops, restaurants, libraries, housing & all that stuff. The problem with allocating all that space is that you turn walkable places where you could live & get access to all the amenities you need on foot or by bicycle into car-dependent suburbs. In a car-dependent ’urb it’s impossible to live without a car, because so much space has been given over to cars that you can’t get anywhere without using one, whether you like it or not. Even travelling short distances that many people would be happy to walk becomes impossible once enough space has been given over to cars, because the roads become so wide that crossing them becomes an exercise in taking your life in your hands.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
I’m open to converting to electric when my very efficient combo eventually dies, as long as I can continue to cook on a gas hob.
Electric hobs are absolutely shit. Conventional, induction, all universally shit. No wonder professional kitchens all use gas.
I used to think the same, but our house had an induction hob when we moved in and I'm not sure I'd switch back to gas now. Heats as quick as gas (faster, I'd say). Smooth hob for cleaning (and it's basically impossible to burn spillages on). The hob itself only gets hot from contact with the saucepan and cools down very quickly, so it's safer for children.
Bit of a problem if you want to char something over a gas flame though!
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
We've only got so much land though. And if you live in a city, there tends to be an upper bound on highway width, because there are buildings on either side of the highway. The number of places where we can cheerfully knock down buildings on one side or other are quite limited. If we were starting from scratch, I'd perhaps agree with you - though in general I'd try to avoid too many streets which were car-dominated. New towns are a little unfashionable, however, and most people live in old towns. Great Ancoats Street in Manchester is a lovely example of boulevardisation. It used to be a fairly grim dual-carriageway through classic CBD frame ugliness. There are still four lanes of traffic, but it is now a much more human environment; there are trees, crossing opportunities, and an infinitely nicer urban environment, with active frontages at ground floor level. It's genuinely pleasant to walk along now. But this is an unusual example where the highway width to achieve this was there.
I’m open to converting to electric when my very efficient combo eventually dies, as long as I can continue to cook on a gas hob.
Electric hobs are absolutely shit. Conventional, induction, all universally shit. No wonder professional kitchens all use gas.
If you have enough energy you can create methane using electrolysis and the Sabatier process.
We'd need to generate a huge amount of wind energy if we're also going to use it to power cars and create methane, but that's my favoured outcome. Because using electricity for a hob is crap.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Try getting rid of the buses in London & see what happens...
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
It will be an interesting Darwinian experiment. How many generations will it take for genes that cause deafness to be weeded out?
I’m open to converting to electric when my very efficient combo eventually dies, as long as I can continue to cook on a gas hob.
Electric hobs are absolutely shit. Conventional, induction, all universally shit. No wonder professional kitchens all use gas.
I bought a portable induction hob and I was actually really impressed with it. Of course, it was to replace the terrible, terrible electric hob we have in this house. It's privately rented and the landlords won't put a gas hob in.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
More streets means more space dedicated to cars instead of the things people actually want - shops, restaurants, libraries, housing & all that stuff. The problem with allocating all that space is that you turn walkable places where you could live & get access to all the amenities you need on foot or by bicycle into car-dependent suburbs. In a car-dependent ’urb it’s impossible to live without a car, because so much space has been given over to cars that you can’t get anywhere without using one, whether you like it or not. Even travelling short distances that many people would be happy to walk becomes impossible once enough space has been given over to cars, because the roads become so wide that crossing them becomes an exercise in taking your life in your hands.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
The country is not short of space.
70% of UK land is used for agriculture. Agriculture is 0.61% of UK GDP.
Personally I find dedicating 70% of land to 0.61% of GDP to be rather inefficient - what about you?
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
The EU AVAS directive means BEVs have to emit an artificial noise of at least 56db up to speeds of 20km/hr. The BMW i4 had its noise custom synthesised the composer Hans Zimmer who's done loads of films I can't remember but am sure are notable.
I’m open to converting to electric when my very efficient combo eventually dies, as long as I can continue to cook on a gas hob.
Electric hobs are absolutely shit. Conventional, induction, all universally shit. No wonder professional kitchens all use gas.
Yeah, I'd struggle a lot without a gas hob. When we moved flat in 2014 it was actually a deal breaker for both of us as some newer build places didn't have incoming gas lines.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Try getting rid of the buses in London & see what happens...
I wasn't talking about getting rid of buses in cities.
Most of the country doesn't live in a city though. Cities are irrelevant big picture wise, if they weren't, we'd have a landslide Labour government right now.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
The EU AVAS directive means BEVs have to emit an artificial noise of at least 56db up to speeds of 20km/hr. The BMW i4 had its noise custom synthesised the composer Hans Zimmer who's done loads of films I can't remember but am sure are notable.
Yes, EVs are made deliberately noisy by legislation.
Mr. Max, I'd also question that on resilience grounds.
If everything (boiler, cooking) is electric, then if you lose power you not only have no electricity, you can't cook anything and you lose the heating.
Mr. Thompson, I quite like eating the food that farms make.
So do I.
I don't give a shit which country makes that food though. Land for agriculture is not a UK competitive advantage.
We don't need to remove all our agricultural land either. If we reduced agriculture to say 60% of land and 0.5% of GDP then that would free up a tremendous amount of land for doing useful stuff with.
Interesting article Mark, with which I agree. Like you I am going to ignore the 'North of the border issue'. Having done that I am going to take an even more simplistic view. Boris (and I say Boris rather than the Conservatives) has successfully pulled off the apparent impossible by walking into Labour's territory without losing Conservative territory. Ann Milton warned Boris that what he was doing would lose Guildford. Boris responses was if that were the case then so be it. He might be very lucky or had a cunning plan, but the consequences are that the Lib Dems have now pretty much disappeared so the Guildfords of the south were not lost and one can't see how they will in the future either. There really isn't an alternative in the traditional Conservative seats now even if many Conservatives in these areas don't like it.
Short of a dramatic event I can't see this changing for sometime. Boris can focus on his North and Midland gains without much risk in the South.
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.
Yet another outing for the old 'wealthy people can't be left wing unless they're hypocritical phonies' trope.
This is a twist on the politics of envy. What it's actually saying is the following -
"Look, you're rich, good for you, but don't go pretending you're morally superior as well. You can have your cake or you can eat it. Not both."
It's a close relation to something I came across in the City. People being pissed off that traders were allowed to wear casual clothes for work. Sentiment being, "If you're gonna get paid stupid sums for operating a glorified call centre, least you can do is have to struggle into a suit and tie every day. Tosspots."
Shame is often those rich, public schoolboys who vote Labour, James O’Brien springs to mind, point & guffaw at working class Leave/UKIP/Tories saying “They’re literally voting to make themselves poorer!!” whilst voting to make themselves poorer and thinking it a virtue
Cute point but flawed. Because rich people voting knowingly against their economic self-interest is a wholly different thing to poor people being conned into voting against theirs.
That's why your point doesn't quite work. Whether they were actually being conned is a separate argument. I think they were, as you know.
And I totally agree with you about 'guffawing'. It's in all circumstances a reprehensible thing. I never guffaw and I distance myself from those who do.
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
Derby North is already Conservative!
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
Nottingham has all three relevant effects: urban, BAME, academia/Guardianista.
Nottingham North, however, is neither BAME nor Guardianista. It's very WWC. Perhaps there's an adjacency effect? The other two are all three, to varying extents.
Urban, majority from high of 18k down to under 5k.
Mr. Thompson, quite useful having a domestic food supply, however. Especially if political woe or unforeseen events (tanker blocking the Suez Canal, or a pandemic) cause disruption with global supplies.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
It will be an interesting Darwinian experiment. How many generations will it take for genes that cause deafness to be weeded out?
I think that the modern habit of wandering around with headphone on is quite dangerous - the noise cancelling ones in particular. There is a complete loss of situational awareness.
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I live in a rented one-bedroom cottage. Some more space would be nice but it's basically fine. People exaggerate the virtues of sprawling properties unless you have lots of kids - it's more important to have a decent place and security of tenure, and I count my blessings and see no need to spend more on myself where there are others with more urgent needs. That doesn't mean being fanatically austere - I go on holiday once a year in normal times, eat nice food, etc. Essentially I'd like to live in a society where we all had a basically good life, and in its absence I try to help change it while living a pleasant personal life.
I've seen the effect of moving from a cramped place to a larger one multiple times - it has a profound psychological effect on quite alot of people.
Especially when it is a family or more than one person.
When I become absolute dictator of Britain, all rooms in all new built properties will be 25m2 by law.
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I live in a rented one-bedroom cottage. Some more space would be nice but it's basically fine. People exaggerate the virtues of sprawling properties unless you have lots of kids - it's more important to have a decent place and security of tenure, and I count my blessings and see no need to spend more on myself where there are others with more urgent needs. That doesn't mean being fanatically austere - I go on holiday once a year in normal times, eat nice food, etc. Essentially I'd like to live in a society where we all had a basically good life, and in its absence I try to help change it while living a pleasant personal life.
So your cottage I assume has space?
Were many cottages with space like yours in the "social housing" you authorised in the Council after boasting about cancelling building good homes for people to live in?
I'd like to live in a society where we all have a good life too. That doesn't mean cramming the plebs into "social housing" while keeping the space for yourself away from them. That means everyone having the opportunity to have a good home, which means having as many good homes as there are households.
I don't know how you define space? I don't want to bore people with my private arrangements, but the living room and bedroom are about 12 and 8 sq m. The social housing that we build is significantly larger. You seem to imagine social housing to be tiny hutches where four people sleep in each room. It's not normally like that - the definition is somewhere with rent or purchase price 40% below the local market rate.
The thing is that even in Waverley (the second richest borough in Britain) people growing up even in prosperous families generally need to live outside the area unless their families subsidise them. It causes a lot of upset, and while there are plenty of 3-4 bed detached houses there is huge demand for smaller places that young people could afford. Developers don't like to build them because the main constraint is land (we are also the second most wooded borough in Britain so green belt abounds), and of course they make more money if they use the available land to build some more big detached homes and sell them to people retiring out of London. As a Labour councillor, I'm keen to insist that as far as possible, we satisfy local demand for places that most people can afford.
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?
I want local control to ensure a useful local service for everyone, not expensive tickets. It is not beyond the wit of man to enable decent wages and conditions for employees. Bus (and train) services are a common good. They enable citizens to be mobile and able to get to work, shop, and socialise without paying the exhorbitant costs to run cars that is now becoming the norm. Would it be impossible for this to be run as part of the tories “green agenda” or whatever their phrase is this week? I am certain the “red wall” voters would prefer their tax was spent on this than more wind turbines which subsidise rich landowners and give ever more economic power to China.
Absolutely not!
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Eh? Why not? Moving 50-odd people even by quite a polluting bus has got to be less polluting than 45 electric cars. But buses are increasingly clean. Most round here are electric.
There's 67 million people in this country who need to get about, 80% of whom nation wide get about in cars. About 90% outside of cities.
Buses are gestures big-picture wise for the environment. Getting the cars clean will clean up the environment infinitely more because we don't have 50 people needing to move around, we have tens of millions.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
Building all over the greenbelt and then demanding all our farmers should be made redundant and their produce replaced by imports from New Zealand would destroy the Tory Party in the South (and indeed the farming Tory vote in the North 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.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Yep. A change from the Labour government. Yes, the Tories have been in office not Labour. But when local Labour have no ideas and no vision for anything beyond "its the Tories fault" its easy for black to become white and people vote for an 11 year old government to deliver change against 11 years of local decline.
Starve local government of funding, then present yourself as a refreshing change to the people running local government. Good game, good game.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
More streets means more space dedicated to cars instead of the things people actually want - shops, restaurants, libraries, housing & all that stuff. The problem with allocating all that space is that you turn walkable places where you could live & get access to all the amenities you need on foot or by bicycle into car-dependent suburbs. In a car-dependent ’urb it’s impossible to live without a car, because so much space has been given over to cars that you can’t get anywhere without using one, whether you like it or not. Even travelling short distances that many people would be happy to walk becomes impossible once enough space has been given over to cars, because the roads become so wide that crossing them becomes an exercise in taking your life in your hands.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
The country is not short of space.
70% of UK land is used for agriculture. Agriculture is 0.61% of UK GDP.
Personally I find dedicating 70% of land to 0.61% of GDP to be rather inefficient - what about you?
Air is 0% of the UK economy. Try doing without it. The economics of agriculture show that money and the significance of something are non identical.
Mr. Thompson, quite useful having a domestic food supply, however. Especially if political woe or unforeseen events (tanker blocking the Suez Canal, or a pandemic) cause disruption with global supplies.
Of course but we already import a lot of our food anyway.
Why do we need to dedicate 70% of land to agriculture? If we dedicated instead 60% of land to agriculture, that would still provide a major domestic food supply and free up 10% of land for useful stuff.
In comparison all housing combined for the entire nation uses 5% of land.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
More streets means more space dedicated to cars instead of the things people actually want - shops, restaurants, libraries, housing & all that stuff. The problem with allocating all that space is that you turn walkable places where you could live & get access to all the amenities you need on foot or by bicycle into car-dependent suburbs. In a car-dependent ’urb it’s impossible to live without a car, because so much space has been given over to cars that you can’t get anywhere without using one, whether you like it or not. Even travelling short distances that many people would be happy to walk becomes impossible once enough space has been given over to cars, because the roads become so wide that crossing them becomes an exercise in taking your life in your hands.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
The country is not short of space.
70% of UK land is used for agriculture. Agriculture is 0.61% of UK GDP.
Personally I find dedicating 70% of land to 0.61% of GDP to be rather inefficient - what about you?
I don't think that's a particularly strong argument. We don't allocate land dependent on GDP, otherwise the country would be covered in office blocks. We keep country agricultural because we value green space.
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.
And people wonder why Hartlepool was won with a 7,000 majority.
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
Freeports are political genius.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Perfectly suited to a government that seeks to divide the nation in two (well whats left of the UK after independence in two). And some still believe this government is conservative not radical.
The government has been campaigning as being radical. It literally campaigned on being a vote for change - people in Hartlepool voted for change.
Yep. A change from the Labour government. Yes, the Tories have been in office not Labour. But when local Labour have no ideas and no vision for anything beyond "its the Tories fault" its easy for black to become white and people vote for an 11 year old government to deliver change against 11 years of local decline.
Starve local government of funding, then present yourself as a refreshing change to the people running local government. Good game, good game.
Ah because things were so much better for Hartlepudlians when they were represented by Peter "Your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They've got nowhere to go" Mandleson?
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
Building all over the greenbelt and then demanding all our farmers should be made redundant and their produce replaced by imports from New Zealand would destroy the Tory Party in the South (and indeed the farming Tory vote in the North too)
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
More streets means more space dedicated to cars instead of the things people actually want - shops, restaurants, libraries, housing & all that stuff. The problem with allocating all that space is that you turn walkable places where you could live & get access to all the amenities you need on foot or by bicycle into car-dependent suburbs. In a car-dependent ’urb it’s impossible to live without a car, because so much space has been given over to cars that you can’t get anywhere without using one, whether you like it or not. Even travelling short distances that many people would be happy to walk becomes impossible once enough space has been given over to cars, because the roads become so wide that crossing them becomes an exercise in taking your life in your hands.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
The country is not short of space.
70% of UK land is used for agriculture. Agriculture is 0.61% of UK GDP.
Personally I find dedicating 70% of land to 0.61% of GDP to be rather inefficient - what about you?
I don't think that's a particularly strong argument. We don't allocate land dependent on GDP, otherwise the country would be covered in office blocks. We keep country agricultural because we value green space.
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)
Even the ones you mention aren't safe. For example, Leicester's predominate ethnic minority is Indian / Hindu and two of the seats (East and West) are now within striking difference for the Tories, especially as there seems a further shift of Indian voters to the Conservatives. Derby North is potentially also in striking distance given there is a 2500 Brexit vote to squeeze. Two of the Coventry seats are marginal. Birmingham probably is relatively safe for Labour, as is Nottingham because of the university.
Derby North is already Conservative!
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
Nottingham has all three relevant effects: urban, BAME, academia/Guardianista.
Nottingham North, however, is neither BAME nor Guardianista. It's very WWC. Perhaps there's an adjacency effect? The other two are all three, to varying extents.
I lived there a few years ago (Bulwell). It's as you say, but doesn't have a feeling of being desperately poor either - people get by OK, the public transport is great, there are good inexpensive supermarkets. The main issue is an alarming level of poor literacy (one of the worst in Britain) so there are a lot of people on low-paid jobs. But unemployment is low, cheap housing is plentiful and generally I think people feel life is not that bad.
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.
Yes, and they also need to make the case for positive innovative greenery, as opposed to the greenery proposed by those on the left that is mostly negative and destroying of economic activity.
As we move to zero-emission cars, having suburban people move about via cars in tree-lined streets is going to be very environmentally friendly.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
Unlikely. Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries. Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit. You're also occupying far more road space. I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails. The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'. This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
We don't need to reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets, we can build more and bigger streets.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
Building all over the greenbelt and then demanding all our farmers should be made redundant and their produce replaced by imports from New Zealand would destroy the Tory Party in the South (and indeed the farming Tory vote in the North too)
Mr. Max, I'd also question that on resilience grounds.
If everything (boiler, cooking) is electric, then if you lose power you not only have no electricity, you can't cook anything and you lose the heating.
A few years ago, after one of the big storms, there was total loss of power where a chap I knew from work lived.
As is common, out in the country, most people had oil heating. They were stuffed because they needed electricity to run the pump for the oil and the electric igniter.
My friend was OK because he was a bit of a prepper and had bought a diesel generator which he had modified to run on heating oil. And had a battery backup. So when the electricity went out, the battery backup cut in, and the generator auto started....
I don't think it is going to get the press it should, but the BICS report continues to show a recovery in business performance following the easing of lockdown.
As of 2 May 2021, 10.3% of all workers (~2.7m) were on furlough, approximately half of the ~20% (~5.4m) previously affected by full "lockdown 2". This is only slightly higher than the 8% which accompanied the original lockdown lifting in October 2020. The other confidence measures are similarly comparable to this overall picture.
This does not capture the most recent lifting and the Chancellor probably hopes that this number can be brought to under 5%, a level which will be more sustainable as we approach the end of the scheme in September.
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 Conservative Party adapts and evolves to whatever the circumstances and pressing issues of the day are. It's how it's kept itself as an election winning machine since 1834.
Nothing wrong with that, but you were boasting yesterday about how in local office you were cancelling schemes to build good homes for people to live in, in order to build more "social housing" instead. Crap homes piled high to keep the plebs away from the decent homes and keep the land around decent homes unspoilt rather than building more decent homes.
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I live in a rented one-bedroom cottage. Some more space would be nice but it's basically fine. People exaggerate the virtues of sprawling properties unless you have lots of kids - it's more important to have a decent place and security of tenure, and I count my blessings and see no need to spend more on myself where there are others with more urgent needs. That doesn't mean being fanatically austere - I go on holiday once a year in normal times, eat nice food, etc. Essentially I'd like to live in a society where we all had a basically good life, and in its absence I try to help change it while living a pleasant personal life.
So your cottage I assume has space?
Were many cottages with space like yours in the "social housing" you authorised in the Council after boasting about cancelling building good homes for people to live in?
I'd like to live in a society where we all have a good life too. That doesn't mean cramming the plebs into "social housing" while keeping the space for yourself away from them. That means everyone having the opportunity to have a good home, which means having as many good homes as there are households.
I don't know how you define space? I don't want to bore people with my private arrangements, but the living room and bedroom are about 12 and 8 sq m. The social housing that we build is significantly larger. You seem to imagine social housing to be tiny hutches where four people sleep in each room. It's not normally like that - the definition is somewhere with rent or purchase price 40% below the local market rate.
The thing is that even in Waverley (the second richest borough in Britain) people growing up even in prosperous families generally need to live outside the area unless their families subsidise them. It causes a lot of upset, and while there are plenty of 3-4 bed detached houses there is huge demand for smaller places that young people could afford. Developers don't like to build them because the main constraint is land (we are also the second most wooded borough in Britain so green belt abounds), and of course they make more money if they use the available land to build some more big detached homes and sell them to people retiring out of London. As a Labour councillor, I'm keen to insist that as far as possible, we satisfy local demand for places that most people can afford.
The biggest issue isn't purpose built social housing but the conversion of offices into residential where the rules have a lot more "leeway"..
My goodness, but Mark clearly enjoyed writing this one.
Res ipsa loquitur....
I suspect I will have more fun writing the follow-up piece: where the hell does Labour draw its battle lines for the next election?
Thank you for an excellent article. However, prior to the issue of where to draw battle lines are other pressing questions:
What are the simple retail policies, and what is the vision, which Labour can offer, and do it much better than and different from the Tories? ATM I can think of no positive distinguishing features - not a single one.
Where is the leadership team that can do battle with Boris at all, let alone where.
You can win the battle for integrity, truth, justice and kindness but all to no avail. It's Boris you have to beat.
Comments
Perhaps I could have helped him, plenty of jobs for functionnaires ? 😉
Not many Kulaks in Highgate though, they tend to be more in Crouch End....!
I'm not 100% sure about the employer NI side of things as I've not seen any mention of it and were it to appear I would be among the very first people to open up an office there and abuse it.
In N. Essex buses largely run along main roads, creating a fan system. To get to the next communities 5 miles N or 3 miles S without one's own transport one has either to walk, often along road with some at least heavy lorries, or go ten miles to the outskirts of Colchester, and get another bus to the desired destination.
Why do we have to have retired Routemasters, not 16 or so seaters running between smaller communities.
Fare income: c.£10bn
Subsidy: c.£5bn
During 2020-21:
Fare income: c.£3bn
Subsidy: c.£12bn
For sure there will be a recovery post-COVID, but the days of mass commuting are probably over. The TfL model gives power to the politicians and civil servants. It's on them to decide what to fund.
Oh yeah, whilst building a £100bn new railway.
And I agree that the media banging on about trains is a turn-off for the vast majority who rarely use them.
Climate change will be dealt with like the vaccines - invest in innovative technology to make the problem go away.
I do think some, especially junior, Ministers get carried away with it and venture onto bollocks like veganism and other crap like that. Never going to happen, nor should it.
That seems to have improved cross town transport a bit but it only helps if the bus is heading to the village you want on the other side of town otherwise you still need to switch in the middle.
The simple fact is most companies are now based out of town but buses are designed to take people into the town centre as that was where offices were 30 years ago.
She was prepared to run deficits were necessary. The Post Office, Royal Mail and even the railways will still be more privatised than when she left office too.
Now, that can still be a bad thing from a consumer point of view, if TCO for the replacement is higher than TCO for an equivalent, no longer available, gas boiler. But it is very different to being forced to "get their boilers changed".
Edit to add: I know of a couple of self-builds/major renovations near us where the owner-occupiers have chosen electric boilers over oil/LPG as the all-round better option. We're on gas main with gas boiler, but at the edge of an area with mains gas connection. Interesting that electric boilers are starting to look attractive against oil/LPG, there's clearly the hassle aspect with a fuel that needs delivery and storage, but still something pretty much unheard of a few years back.
On HS2: if it's completed from London to Birmingham and not from Birmingham to Leeds people up here will be pissed off. A fortune spent, but not here.
Back when I still watched news regularly, local news typically had HS2 stories along the lines of people being worried it wouldn't happen or wouldn't go near them and they'd miss out on better transport links.
It's more than just the university (universities, in fact) in Nottingham. All three Nottingham seats have swung massively to Labour over the past 30 years. Perhaps it is an age profile effect? I wonder if Nottingham North (the least university-ish seat) has also got younger.
Out of town premises could even have space for these vehicles to remain parked while waiting for the inhabitants to want to get back into the vehicles and go directly somewhere else too.
I come from a fairly posh background - parents presented at court, earls and generals and so on in the family - I neither apologise for them nor normally boast of them, they're nice people who also didn't choose their background, and if they were assembly line workers that'd be fine too. I've been lucky enough to have a good career with a series of well-paid jobs in the private sector, a spell in Parliament and two single-person businesses. I still work 10+ hours a day. I would like to live in a society in which background didn't matter and we all paid more tax in return for good social security and public service network. In the meantime, I do what I can to succeed in the current society and I give away a lot of money.
What's wrong with that? You might disagree, but do I have to fail in my personal life in order to want Britain to change?
The one we are light on is use of railways for freight, perhaps.
Interesting comparisons:
https://www.bcg.com/en-ch/publications/2017/transportation-travel-tourism-2017-european-railway-performance-index
This is a twist on the politics of envy. What it's actually saying is the following -
"Look, you're rich, good for you, but don't go pretending you're morally superior as well. You can have your cake or you can eat it. Not both."
It's a close relation to something I came across in the City. People being pissed off that traders were allowed to wear casual clothes for work. Sentiment being, "If you're gonna get paid stupid sums for operating a glorified call centre, least you can do is have to struggle into a suit and tie every day. Tosspots."
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
Substantively they are pork barrel disguised as industrial policy.
It is heavy on tyres though. She got about 15,000 miles from her first set but I reckon if it were my daily I could roast a set off it in well under 10k.
Indeed if we're using net zero fuel then I wonder whether clean cars moving about in spacious tree-lined streets will be cleaner than trams in concrete jungles.
There is certainly a gap in the market for the Thatcherite right, and that particular agenda is not being advanced much at the moment. But in amongst the joy and relief of Corbyn not being our PM, and of being free of the stasis of the May era, the qualms that the country isn't being quite as free market as some might like will be fairly muted.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/adm-buries-corn-plant-emissions-equal-to-1-2-million-cars-1.1605988
If you don't mind me asking, do you and your well off family live in a decent home yourself - of the sort that you boasted yesterday you were cancelling being allowed to build for others? Or do you live in a tiny "social housing" flat that you want for others?
I have no problem with people wanting to allow opportunities they've had to be expanded to others. The problem I have with the left is that they tend to want a bare minimum and say "that's enough for you" for most while ensuring they preserve their own lifestyles rather than allowing others to have the aspiration to get the same as you've got.
I haven't got much experience with modern electric replacements, most prior electric ones that I've worked with are really crap in comparison though. They take much longer to warm up and get going which is not good when you're cold.
If they can be cost-efficient, and as good quality, as gas then great. Why not go for it? If they're a crappy alternative that leaves you cold for half an hour while it warms up then no thanks.
Electric cars solve the problem of NO2 emissions and reduce carbon emissions (though carbon is remarkably complex!). OTOH, they increase the emissions of some particulates, and there are also issues around, especially, lithium extraction for batteries.
Basically, however you're doing it, you are, per passenger, moving a lot more weight and having to work a lot harder against friction if you're moving people by cars than if you're moving people by mass transit.
You're also occupying far more road space.
I'm not denying that electric cars are a big step forward, but they are not a panacea to all our urban transport travails.
The point about spacious tree-lined streets is key - we can only really get these streets if we reduce the volume of traffic on our urban streets. For which we need improvements in the provision of non-car modes (including walking - see 'spacious tree-lined streets'.
This can be done without taking a heavy handed, hardline anti-car approach.
One big thing electric cars do give us when we are trying to make streets a nicer place to be is a massive reduction in noise. It's much more pleasant to be in a street with electric cars humming silently past you than being shouted at by an internal combustion engine. It does present issues crossing the road though - it's amazing how much we use sound as an indication that nothing is coming when we cross. We will get used to it soon enough though.
When you take an efficient model - sectorised BR - and throw the 5x subsidy post privatisation at it - think what could have been achieved? Ownership really isn't my issue - there will be more direct control of GBR than there ever was over BR. Its results. And nearly 3 decades down the line of a botched experiment we're back to where we were.
Wind turbines work and provide clean energy that then allows everything else to use energy guilt-free. Want to use electricity? Great, do it, its clean so its not a problem. Want to drive? Great, get an electric car and its clean, go wherever you want guilt-free.
Buses are pissing in the wind in comparison. They're irrelevant claptrap. Useful for people who don't have a car, but they serve zero green purpose.
Moving 50-odd people even by quite a polluting bus has got to be less polluting than 45 electric cars.
But buses are increasingly clean. Most round here are electric.
Have more undeveloped fields developed and built on. You can have buildings for housing, trees for the environment, roads for moving, buildings for businesses etc - rather than fields for animals to wander on that our economically irrelevant and could be imported from New Zealand instead.
The other two are all three, to varying extents.
Buses are gestures big-picture wise for the environment. Getting the cars clean will clean up the environment infinitely more because we don't have 50 people needing to move around, we have tens of millions.
Electric hobs are absolutely shit. Conventional, induction, all universally shit. No wonder professional kitchens all use gas.
Hartlepool has voted consistently for Labour MPs for longer than I've been alive, longer than many voters in Hartlepool have been alive. What have they done to further the interests of Hartlepudlians in that time?
Why vote for another Labour MP who won't do anything for the area, rather than change and vote for a Tory for a change that will do something for the area? 🤔
Were many cottages with space like yours in the "social housing" you authorised in the Council after boasting about cancelling building good homes for people to live in?
I'd like to live in a society where we all have a good life too. That doesn't mean cramming the plebs into "social housing" while keeping the space for yourself away from them. That means everyone having the opportunity to have a good home, which means having as many good homes as there are households.
This is not a model of development that actually leads to a great deal of happiness - individually we all like the idea of the large garden /and/ the wide streets on which we can drive where-ever we want, but the net effect when everyone does that is to destroy the very places we inhabit.
Bit of a problem if you want to char something over a gas flame though!
If we were starting from scratch, I'd perhaps agree with you - though in general I'd try to avoid too many streets which were car-dominated. New towns are a little unfashionable, however, and most people live in old towns.
Great Ancoats Street in Manchester is a lovely example of boulevardisation. It used to be a fairly grim dual-carriageway through classic CBD frame ugliness. There are still four lanes of traffic, but it is now a much more human environment; there are trees, crossing opportunities, and an infinitely nicer urban environment, with active frontages at ground floor level. It's genuinely pleasant to walk along now.
But this is an unusual example where the highway width to achieve this was there.
We'd need to generate a huge amount of wind energy if we're also going to use it to power cars and create methane, but that's my favoured outcome. Because using electricity for a hob is crap.
70% of UK land is used for agriculture.
Agriculture is 0.61% of UK GDP.
Personally I find dedicating 70% of land to 0.61% of GDP to be rather inefficient - what about you?
Most of the country doesn't live in a city though. Cities are irrelevant big picture wise, if they weren't, we'd have a landslide Labour government right now.
If everything (boiler, cooking) is electric, then if you lose power you not only have no electricity, you can't cook anything and you lose the heating.
I don't give a shit which country makes that food though. Land for agriculture is not a UK competitive advantage.
We don't need to remove all our agricultural land either. If we reduced agriculture to say 60% of land and 0.5% of GDP then that would free up a tremendous amount of land for doing useful stuff with.
Short of a dramatic event I can't see this changing for sometime. Boris can focus on his North and Midland gains without much risk in the South.
One has to give Boris credit for this.
That's why your point doesn't quite work. Whether they were actually being conned is a separate argument. I think they were, as you know.
And I totally agree with you about 'guffawing'. It's in all circumstances a reprehensible thing. I never guffaw and I distance myself from those who do.
Especially when it is a family or more than one person.
When I become absolute dictator of Britain, all rooms in all new built properties will be 25m2 by law.
I suspect I will have more fun writing the follow-up piece: where the hell does Labour draw its battle lines for the next election?
The thing is that even in Waverley (the second richest borough in Britain) people growing up even in prosperous families generally need to live outside the area unless their families subsidise them. It causes a lot of upset, and while there are plenty of 3-4 bed detached houses there is huge demand for smaller places that young people could afford. Developers don't like to build them because the main constraint is land (we are also the second most wooded borough in Britain so green belt abounds), and of course they make more money if they use the available land to build some more big detached homes and sell them to people retiring out of London. As a Labour councillor, I'm keen to insist that as far as possible, we satisfy local demand for places that most people can afford.
https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2021/05/labour-voters-make-kim-leadbeater-sister-of-jo-cox-early-favourite-in-the-batley-and-spen-by-election.html
Why do we need to dedicate 70% of land to agriculture? If we dedicated instead 60% of land to agriculture, that would still provide a major domestic food supply and free up 10% of land for useful stuff.
In comparison all housing combined for the entire nation uses 5% of land.
As is common, out in the country, most people had oil heating. They were stuffed because they needed electricity to run the pump for the oil and the electric igniter.
My friend was OK because he was a bit of a prepper and had bought a diesel generator which he had modified to run on heating oil. And had a battery backup. So when the electricity went out, the battery backup cut in, and the generator auto started....
As of 2 May 2021, 10.3% of all workers (~2.7m) were on furlough, approximately half of the ~20% (~5.4m) previously affected by full "lockdown 2". This is only slightly higher than the 8% which accompanied the original lockdown lifting in October 2020. The other confidence measures are similarly comparable to this overall picture.
This does not capture the most recent lifting and the Chancellor probably hopes that this number can be brought to under 5%, a level which will be more sustainable as we approach the end of the scheme in September.
What are the simple retail policies, and what is the vision, which Labour can offer, and do it much better than and different from the Tories? ATM I can think of no positive distinguishing features - not a single one.
Where is the leadership team that can do battle with Boris at all, let alone where.
You can win the battle for integrity, truth, justice and kindness but all to no avail. It's Boris you have to beat.