GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Calling it Great English Railways probably would have been equally popular
And then the same people complaining about the Great British name would be moaning that it isn't true either because they control the infrastructure in Scotland and Wales, and it is just the arrogant English at it again....can't win either way.
The more important question is will it result in a better service.....
We have just been advised that hybrid working will be the new normal going forward, with staff in the office, on average, 50% of the time.
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
I am contracted to a Romanian client I have never met and organising production trials out of a factory I haven't visited. I have negotiated for them a partnership agreement with a UK company who I have never met. Its business Jim, but know as we know it.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Oh my.
I had him down as an extreme Southerner.
Now I discover he's a turncoat as well .
On comment: I think the point of inflexion in the perceived political direction may actually be the Miners' Strike, though the main demographic / geographical trend is more recent with industrial diseases etc killing people early. There still quite a lot of people who remember King Arthur sending his flying thugs down the motorway to intimidate. I remember not being able to get to school because a thousand of them were trying to force the closure of Babbington Colliery.
And a lot of people bought their Council Houses.
More recently there are things like a biggish regional light-rail system which has affected where people live to an extent.
---------------------- At Babbington colliery, police faced 2,000 pickets and were pelted with stones when they made more than 60 arrests.
Seven officers needed treatment for cuts to the head and legs. One officer suffered an eye injury and a union spokesman was also hurt.
Less than half the normal shift of 200 men went into work, but the pit was able to continue production.
He was a meticulous timekeeper. One day he missed the bus. By the time he had could get the next bus, his shift had gone down - and were killed in an explosion.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
Rushcliffe is probably more Gosforth.
In the Nottingham context Gateshead would be Derby
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Indeed. It is an unrealistic target without massive infrastructure investment - which doesn't seem to be happening - and even if it was, it would no doubt turn out to be investment in old technology that is out of date before it is finished. Think DAB or Smart Meters on a bigger scale.
Oddly, there doesn't seem to be the drive to get rid of aviation emissions at the same pace. The result of that will be that it will become easier for me to get on a plane to the US than drive to the Highlands.
I wonder whether some vehicle types will be exempted and if this will drive some unexpected behaviour. Perhaps we'll have people driving round in lorry cabs, Chris Eubank style.
Pickup trucks. Same as everyone self-employed bought a decade or so ago, when they spotted a ‘loophole’ in the company car tax regime that allowed commercial vehicles to be exempt from BIK.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I'm in favour of having more green spaces, more gardens, more parks, more trees where people live.
I'm in favour of protecting the non-agricultural countryside; forests and other areas of outstanding natural beauty etc I have agreed should be protected. As the exception not the norm.
Intensive farming fields that nobody besides a farmer can go into, that take up 70% of the countries land and generate 0.61% of GDP? Some of that can be better used, with the farmers paid handsomely no doubt for their land.
We've currently got 5% of the UK dedicated to housing, 70% for agricultural fields. If we went to 6% and 69% then that would increase the space for housing by 20%, while reducing agricultural land by 1.4% and reducing agricultures contribution to GDP potentially by 0.008%
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
++++++
Sympathies. I reckon we will discover lots of downsides to "hybrid working" exactly like this. We have rushed into epochal changes without properly thinking
It's not true in the slightest. Plenty of GBR trains will serve stations in Scotland and Wales. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the press officer needs to read up on it a bit?
Pause. Breathe. Stop making arrogant fact-free statements.
GBR will not set fares in Scotland. Four of their concessions will operate trains that run to Scotland but the fares there will be set by Scotrail as they are now. Simplification will mean the TOC-only fares being removed, so an end to fares set by Cross Country and LNER for internal Scottish services.
I'm not making any such thing. I haven't mentioned ticketing. I'm merely saying that the claim by the press officer that GBR will "operate only" in England is a nonsense. It is demonstrably untrue. Plenty of GBR trains will operate in Scotland as you yourself point out.
What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you.
It seems like the national system is breaking down with different regions deciding to fudge the rules...
A scheme to offer university students walk-in Covid vaccinations has been suspended on its second day after too many people turned up.
Bournemouth University said it was told "all students" could queue for jabs at Bournemouth International Centre for seven days, beginning on Tuesday. Yesterday hundreds of students turned up - with some queuing for up to eight hours, while others were turned away.
---
I am not sure this is the best approach, as one of the beauties of the roll out so far has been the simplicity, so everybody knew where they stood (and makes planning much easier).
Well, everyone sure knew where they were standing: in the queue in the street.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Lol, Rhodes doesn't fall. Oriel College decline to do so because of expense and regulatory concerns, especially given that the culture secretary has an effective veto over its removal now.
Expect Twitter go go mental over it, I wonder whether Labour will fall into this trap as well or if they'll manage to sidestep it by not saying anything. We know the Tories will celebrate it especially given that Oriel have cited regulatory issues as the major reason to not do it.
(there's something else somewhere on the Graun website)
For now? Sounds quite blackmaily to me, just keep those £100m chunks coming and your precious statue will be fine..
It looks carefully choregraphed to me.
You write the report saying it should come down, we'll say we can't do it at the moment, and we'll tell our donors we never will if they keep the money flowing.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Sad to say, but the Conservatives do have to spontaneously combust before Labour is even allowed to speak to the voters of (to quote Priestley) Rusty Lane, West Bromwich.
It is difficult to see what Labour, or anyone else can offer, when the Johnsonian vision of English purity and his sunny disposition has captured the zeitgeist.
Personally, I would keep the social justice to a minimum (sod, love thy neighbour, this is a dog-eat-dog world) and focus on environmental themes. Maybe proposing a sanctuary for the Brexit unicorns- Family Starmer almost has form here!
That is too pessimistic. A mere 6 months ago Johnson was in trouble in such areas. The guy is inherently unstable. Just give him another 6 months.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
The boundaries of Nottingham are almost as bonkers as those of Newcastle. As those snivelling Notts County fans why they sing: "One team in Nott'm..."
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Network rail covers Scotland - this new thing will take on their infrastructure.
Perhaps it should run the ferries to the Scottish Islands too given the disaster the SNP have made of running those.
That's actually a bit of a shame really. Would have been nice to have a GB-wide system.
That's devolution for you. In fact, it will probably only be the "DfT TOCs", so not London Overground, TfL Rail, Merseyrail, ScotRail, Caledonian Sleeper and TfW Rail.
Well yes, as ScotRail is being renationalised – to the Scottish Government – and TfL is already nationalised (and indeed was never privatised in the first place). Ditto NI Rail.
I'm not sure what the problem is? GBR is a state-run English railway that serves some stations in Scotland and Wales. This is entirely normal – TGV (France) and Trentitalia (Italy) are nationalised railways that – guess what? – cross borders.
People aren't going to be kicked out at the banks of the Tweed and told to continue their journey by river raft.
Berwick station is on the north bank of the Tweed, in (lately) English territory.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Oh my.
I had him down as an extreme Southerner.
Now I discover he's a turncoat as well .
On comment: I think the point of inflexion in the perceived political direction may actually be the Miners' Strike, though the main demographic / geographical trend is more recent with industrial diseases etc killing people early. There still quite a lot of people who remember King Arthur sending his flying thugs down the motorway to intimidate. I remember not being able to get to school because a thousand of them were trying to force the closure of Babbington Colliery.
And a lot of people bought their Council Houses.
More recently there are things like a biggish regional light-rail system which has affected where people live to an extent.
---------------------- At Babbington colliery, police faced 2,000 pickets and were pelted with stones when they made more than 60 arrests.
Seven officers needed treatment for cuts to the head and legs. One officer suffered an eye injury and a union spokesman was also hurt.
Less than half the normal shift of 200 men went into work, but the pit was able to continue production.
Those UDM lads were taken for absolute mugs. Ended up in the same dole queue as the rest of the miners.
But they didn't spend thirteen months going without income in the meantime.
The economics of the strike baffled me then and baffled me still. Government: we can't afford to carry on subsidising the extraction of coal. We'll have to close down pits and import it. Miners: if you do that, we'll stop working. Government: er, ok.
(I know this is highly oversimplified, but still.)
You can only really strike if you are doing something where the economics are in your favour. This is why school strikes never achieved anything.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Oh my.
I had him down as an extreme Southerner.
Now I discover he's a turncoat as well .
On comment: I think the point of inflexion in the perceived political direction may actually be the Miners' Strike, though the main demographic / geographical trend is more recent with industrial diseases etc killing people early. There still quite a lot of people who remember King Arthur sending his flying thugs down the motorway to intimidate. I remember not being able to get to school because a thousand of them were trying to force the closure of Babbington Colliery.
And a lot of people bought their Council Houses.
More recently there are things like a biggish regional light-rail system which has affected where people live to an extent.
---------------------- At Babbington colliery, police faced 2,000 pickets and were pelted with stones when they made more than 60 arrests.
Seven officers needed treatment for cuts to the head and legs. One officer suffered an eye injury and a union spokesman was also hurt.
Less than half the normal shift of 200 men went into work, but the pit was able to continue production.
Those UDM lads were taken for absolute mugs. Ended up in the same dole queue as the rest of the miners.
If all the miners had been UDM, would they have all ended up in the dole queue? Maybe, but not as quickly.
A friend of mine was a mining engineer who had to keep a mine going during the strike. He was attacked and beaten up on his way to the colliery.
The mob later descended on the offices and the management had to retreat to a corridor and arm themselves with iron bars on the grounds that 'they can only come at us one at a time'.
Without him and a few others the pit would have quickly become unrecoverable, so I'm not sure what the NUM lot actually wanted.
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Calling it Great English Railways probably would have been equally popular
They could quite feasibly call it that. Why not? French trains operate in Italy and vice versa. It's an English state-run railway that crosses borders, just like most other European state-run railways.
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
When I was a lad, West Bridgford was known as "bread and lard island"....
That's actually a bit of a shame really. Would have been nice to have a GB-wide system.
That's devolution for you. In fact, it will probably only be the "DfT TOCs", so not London Overground, TfL Rail, Merseyrail, ScotRail, Caledonian Sleeper and TfW Rail.
Well yes, as ScotRail is being renationalised – to the Scottish Government – and TfL is already nationalised (and indeed was never privatised in the first place). Ditto NI Rail.
I'm not sure what the problem is? GBR is a state-run English railway that serves some stations in Scotland and Wales. This is entirely normal – TGV (France) and Trentitalia (Italy) are nationalised railways that – guess what? – cross borders.
People aren't going to be kicked out at the banks of the Tweed and told to continue their journey by river raft.
Berwick station is on the north bank of the Tweed, in (lately) English territory.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
Just eight and a half years to get ALL the required infrastructures in place is indeed "demanding".
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Oh my.
I had him down as an extreme Southerner.
Now I discover he's a turncoat as well .
On comment: I think the point of inflexion in the perceived political direction may actually be the Miners' Strike, though the main demographic / geographical trend is more recent with industrial diseases etc killing people early. There still quite a lot of people who remember King Arthur sending his flying thugs down the motorway to intimidate. I remember not being able to get to school because a thousand of them were trying to force the closure of Babbington Colliery.
And a lot of people bought their Council Houses.
More recently there are things like a biggish regional light-rail system which has affected where people live to an extent.
---------------------- At Babbington colliery, police faced 2,000 pickets and were pelted with stones when they made more than 60 arrests.
Seven officers needed treatment for cuts to the head and legs. One officer suffered an eye injury and a union spokesman was also hurt.
Less than half the normal shift of 200 men went into work, but the pit was able to continue production.
He was a meticulous timekeeper. One day he missed the bus. By the time he had could get the next bus, his shift had gone down - and were killed in an explosion.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Gateshead hasn't been in County Durham for almost half a century.
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Calling it Great English Railways probably would have been equally popular
They could quite feasibly call it that. Why not? French trains operate in Italy and vice versa. It's an English state-run railway that crosses borders, just like most other European state-run railways.
Which is the literal point that Liar's spokesperson was making which you said was incorrect. LNER / Avanti / Cross Country / TPE will still run across the border. But not set their fares or their timetables there. GBR's reach from an operational perspective ends at the Royal Border Bridge.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Sad to say, but the Conservatives do have to spontaneously combust before Labour is even allowed to speak to the voters of (to quote Priestley) Rusty Lane, West Bromwich.
It is difficult to see what Labour, or anyone else can offer, when the Johnsonian vision of English purity and his sunny disposition has captured the zeitgeist.
Personally, I would keep the social justice to a minimum (sod, love thy neighbour, this is a dog-eat-dog world) and focus on environmental themes. Maybe proposing a sanctuary for the Brexit unicorns- Family Starmer almost has form here!
And that's the heart of the matter.
There are reasonable reasons to anticipate that Johnsonism, like Berlusconismo, will do the country significant harm in the medium-to-long term. But to argue that is to be, at best, a doomster and a gloomster. At worst, it's to be an unpatriot who wants the country to fail.
But whilst it's execrable government, it's excellent short term electoral politics, and blooming difficult to oppose.
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
++++++
Sympathies. I reckon we will discover lots of downsides to "hybrid working" exactly like this. We have rushed into epochal changes without properly thinking
With hybrid working, inductions, etc. are exactly the sort of thing that happens in person. Meeting colleagues on a day when everyone agrees to go in. Staring at a screen all day is the activity that happens at home.
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Network rail covers Scotland - this new thing will take on their infrastructure.
Perhaps it should run the ferries to the Scottish Islands too given the disaster the SNP have made of running those.
Recovered from the excesses of the weekend, Harold?
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Sad to say, but the Conservatives do have to spontaneously combust before Labour is even allowed to speak to the voters of (to quote Priestley) Rusty Lane, West Bromwich.
It is difficult to see what Labour, or anyone else can offer, when the Johnsonian vision of English purity and his sunny disposition has captured the zeitgeist.
Personally, I would keep the social justice to a minimum (sod, love thy neighbour, this is a dog-eat-dog world) and focus on environmental themes. Maybe proposing a sanctuary for the Brexit unicorns- Family Starmer almost has form here!
That is too pessimistic. A mere 6 months ago Johnson was in trouble in such areas. The guy is inherently unstable. Just give him another 6 months.
I am sure "events dear boy" will prevail.
It is however like being in the relegation zone, nine points from safety with four games in hand and they are all away to top four clubs, none of whom are yet guaranteed a place in Europe.
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
1. I'm a bloke and 2. I never contended the above. As Leon said, a complete straw man by you.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
It's not true in the slightest. Plenty of GBR trains will serve stations in Scotland and Wales. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the press officer needs to read up on it a bit?
Pause. Breathe. Stop making arrogant fact-free statements.
GBR will not set fares in Scotland. Four of their concessions will operate trains that run to Scotland but the fares there will be set by Scotrail as they are now. Simplification will mean the TOC-only fares being removed, so an end to fares set by Cross Country and LNER for internal Scottish services.
I'm not making any such thing. I haven't mentioned ticketing. I'm merely saying that the claim by the press officer that GBR will "operate only" in England is a nonsense. It is demonstrably untrue. Plenty of GBR trains will operate in Scotland as you yourself point out.
What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
So, you're saying you're hungover and want to blame a Lime tree?
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Calling it Great English Railways probably would have been equally popular
They could quite feasibly call it that. Why not? French trains operate in Italy and vice versa. It's an English state-run railway that crosses borders, just like most other European state-run railways.
Which is the literal point that Liar's spokesperson was making which you said was incorrect. LNER / Avanti / Cross Country / TPE will still run across the border. But not set their fares or their timetables there. GBR's reach from an operational perspective ends at the Royal Border Bridge.
They will be concessions under the GBR brand. They demonstrably WILL serve Scottish stations just as they do now.
Labour might win Batley but heading into a pub and asking "Will you be voting for Jo Cox's sister" - which is about what the ConHome chap did is going to elicit a bias response. Most voters will have no idea who she is.
It is a hard call for Labour, IMO
Kim Leadbetter appears a very capable, personable candidate with local roots. She has a unifying appeal with "More in Common". And David Herdson speaks very highly of her.
But, she has no political experience (was she even a member of the Labour party before deciding to put her name forward ?)
This is likely to be a messy by-election and (at the risk of echoing Gordon Brown), this is no time for a novice. She is likely to receive much more scrutiny and even hostility as a political candidate than she has ever experienced before in running local charity.
Hard call ... Labour need a very safe pair of hands.
I'm scratching my head, but no, I can't think of that safe pair of hands.
My temptation would be give Pidcock another try out, when she sinks without trace, hopefully that will be her done for eternity.
GB-wide. Network Rail does not cover Northern Ireland. Its future control over chunks of Wales, Merseyside and all of Scotland also looks increasingly tenuous. This is Great English Railways but we can't call it that.
Calling it Great English Railways probably would have been equally popular
They could quite feasibly call it that. Why not? French trains operate in Italy and vice versa. It's an English state-run railway that crosses borders, just like most other European state-run railways.
Which is the literal point that Liar's spokesperson was making which you said was incorrect. LNER / Avanti / Cross Country / TPE will still run across the border. But not set their fares or their timetables there. GBR's reach from an operational perspective ends at the Royal Border Bridge.
They will be concessions under the GBR brand. They demonstrably WILL serve Scottish stations just as they do now.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I have no objection to non-agricultural countryside.
I just don't think its necessary to maintain 70% of land in this country as agricultural countryside.
Nor do I agree with abusing the green belt, not to maintain the countryside, but instead as a weapon to keep houses unaffordable.
The green belt today is twice the size of the green belt in 1979, despite the fact that we have many more population needing housing now so it would be logical to have a smaller belt not a bigger one.
Since 1995 there has actually been a drop in Green Belt land 37,000 hectares.
So more than doubled between 1979 and 1995 and a 2% drop since 1995?
On this one the more than doubling wins as the more relevant stat!
Well if you want to look at Statistics like that, in 1939 there were 11,300,000 houses in Britain serving 41 million people - 3.6 people per house.
There are now 27 million houses serving 68 million people - or 2.5 people per house.
That’s a brilliant statistic, that does more than almost any other to illustrate the problem. I suspect the 1939 figure of 3.6 held up until about 1975.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Sad to say, but the Conservatives do have to spontaneously combust before Labour is even allowed to speak to the voters of (to quote Priestley) Rusty Lane, West Bromwich.
It is difficult to see what Labour, or anyone else can offer, when the Johnsonian vision of English purity and his sunny disposition has captured the zeitgeist.
Personally, I would keep the social justice to a minimum (sod, love thy neighbour, this is a dog-eat-dog world) and focus on environmental themes. Maybe proposing a sanctuary for the Brexit unicorns- Family Starmer almost has form here!
That is too pessimistic. A mere 6 months ago Johnson was in trouble in such areas. The guy is inherently unstable. Just give him another 6 months.
I am sure "events dear boy" will prevail.
It is however like being in the relegation zone, nine points from safety with four games in hand and they are all away to top four clubs, none of whom are yet guaranteed a place in Europe.
Perhaps you need to consult your own coments from a few months ago re-Bridgend and the impending Wales Assembly Election. The outcome proved to be a bit different!
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
Rushcliffe is probably more Gosforth.
In the Nottingham context Gateshead would be Derby
Nope, Gateshead is a few metres across the Tyne from Newcastle City – part and parcel of the same city for all intents and purposes.
Derby is separate from Nottingham, albeit not too far away.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Oh my.
I had him down as an extreme Southerner.
Now I discover he's a turncoat as well .
On comment: I think the point of inflexion in the perceived political direction may actually be the Miners' Strike, though the main demographic / geographical trend is more recent with industrial diseases etc killing people early. There still quite a lot of people who remember King Arthur sending his flying thugs down the motorway to intimidate. I remember not being able to get to school because a thousand of them were trying to force the closure of Babbington Colliery.
And a lot of people bought their Council Houses.
More recently there are things like a biggish regional light-rail system which has affected where people live to an extent.
---------------------- At Babbington colliery, police faced 2,000 pickets and were pelted with stones when they made more than 60 arrests.
Seven officers needed treatment for cuts to the head and legs. One officer suffered an eye injury and a union spokesman was also hurt.
Less than half the normal shift of 200 men went into work, but the pit was able to continue production.
He was a meticulous timekeeper. One day he missed the bus. By the time he had could get the next bus, his shift had gone down - and were killed in an explosion.
If he hadn't missed that bus - no thread header.
Proof, if it were needed, that God is a Conservative.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Gateshead hasn't been in County Durham for almost half a century.
Get over it.
"What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you."
Gateshead is in County Durham. It is not administered by Durham County Council. Which is not the same thing at all. Nor is 1974 the year you are looking for - Gateshead became a county borough in the 1880s.
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
1. I'm a bloke and 2. I never contended the above. As Leon said, a complete straw man by you.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
GBR will not operate trains in England either. Or anywhere. As they are not going to be a train operator.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I have no objection to non-agricultural countryside.
I just don't think its necessary to maintain 70% of land in this country as agricultural countryside.
Nor do I agree with abusing the green belt, not to maintain the countryside, but instead as a weapon to keep houses unaffordable.
The green belt today is twice the size of the green belt in 1979, despite the fact that we have many more population needing housing now so it would be logical to have a smaller belt not a bigger one.
Since 1995 there has actually been a drop in Green Belt land 37,000 hectares.
So more than doubled between 1979 and 1995 and a 2% drop since 1995?
On this one the more than doubling wins as the more relevant stat!
Well if you want to look at Statistics like that, in 1939 there were 11,300,000 houses in Britain serving 41 million people - 3.6 people per house.
There are now 27 million houses serving 68 million people - or 2.5 people per house.
That’s a brilliant statistic, that does more than almost any other to illustrate the problem. I suspect the 1939 figure of 3.6 held up until about 1975.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
So, you're saying you're hungover and want to blame a Lime tree?
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
I've been snuffling myself lately so had a look out of interest. But seems too early for limes. London - so plane trees? Other allergenogenic trees are available.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
Its not just the infrastructure, it is the changes made to how we drive. Right now there are around 90,000 petrol and diesel pumps in the country. Filling up takes 3-4 minutes and there are still regular queues at many stations. The very best electric cars charge at the equivalent of between 30 and 80 miles per hour. So to get the equivalent of filling your car up you would have to charge for somewhere between 5 and 12 hours.
Of course we all hope this will change but right now we are making plans based on technology that doesn't even exist.
And before people go on about home charging, there are large parts of the country where that is just no practical as there is no drive on which to park your car or garage to put it in.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
If they own the track, run some of the services, and have stations in Scotland then surely by any normal definition of the word operate GBR will be operating in Scotland.
It's not true in the slightest. Plenty of GBR trains will serve stations in Scotland and Wales. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the press officer needs to read up on it a bit?
Pause. Breathe. Stop making arrogant fact-free statements.
GBR will not set fares in Scotland. Four of their concessions will operate trains that run to Scotland but the fares there will be set by Scotrail as they are now. Simplification will mean the TOC-only fares being removed, so an end to fares set by Cross Country and LNER for internal Scottish services.
I'm not making any such thing. I haven't mentioned ticketing. I'm merely saying that the claim by the press officer that GBR will "operate only" in England is a nonsense. It is demonstrably untrue. Plenty of GBR trains will operate in Scotland as you yourself point out.
What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
You are dancing on the head of pin. Train services contracted out by GBR are concessions to GBR and WILL serve Scotland. They will carry the GBR brand and arrive into Scottish stations. They will not stop at the border, divest themselves of all their passengers and round-up kilt-wearing locals sitting patiently for a train on the north bank of the River Tweed. Thus GBR will serve Scotland – demonstrably so given that its trains will arrive into Scottish stations.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
I've been snuffling myself lately so had a look out of interest. But seems too early for limes. London - so plane trees? Other allergogenic trees are available.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Gateshead hasn't been in County Durham for almost half a century.
Get over it.
Try going to Barnoldswick and telling the locals that they aren't in Yorkshire. They've got a bloody big flagpole in the middle of the town with a Yorkshire flag fluttering away.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
Its not just the infrastructure, it is the changes made to how we drive. Right now there are around 90,000 petrol and diesel pumps in the country. Filling up takes 3-4 minutes and there are still regular queues at many stations. The very best electric cars charge at the equivalent of between 30 and 80 miles per hour. So to get the equivalent of filling your car up you would have to charge for somewhere between 5 and 12 hours.
Of course we all hope this will change but right now we are making plans based on technology that doesn't even exist.
And before people go on about home charging, there are large parts of the country where that is just no practical as there is no drive on which to park your car or garage to put it in.
The reason why the Tesla experience is hassle free is that it is a unified network with no faff. Until all of the different operators stop pissing around with stand alone charging systems and setups it will never be a viable solution if we are going to have all cars electrified.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
Yes, if you're alergic, but it could be lots of other things too.
The route along the river through Fulham, Hammersmith and Chiswick down to Richmond is very nice.
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?
Yes, I look forward to it. I can't deny I also enjoyed reading this one, but it does feel a tad hubristic.
I like to think it was rather a bookend to the "Boris = Brexit bad man: boooo!" threads we see here too often.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire. I don't recognise the political geography there now. Same across the West Midlands. I just thought it worth exploring how far that change has moved the goalposts for Labour. They now don't even seem to be on the playing surface over much of the Midlands. Yes, that can change - but it seems to be Labour waiting for the Tories to spontaneously combust, rather than anything more proactive.
Sad to say, but the Conservatives do have to spontaneously combust before Labour is even allowed to speak to the voters of (to quote Priestley) Rusty Lane, West Bromwich.
It is difficult to see what Labour, or anyone else can offer, when the Johnsonian vision of English purity and his sunny disposition has captured the zeitgeist.
Personally, I would keep the social justice to a minimum (sod, love thy neighbour, this is a dog-eat-dog world) and focus on environmental themes. Maybe proposing a sanctuary for the Brexit unicorns- Family Starmer almost has form here!
That is too pessimistic. A mere 6 months ago Johnson was in trouble in such areas. The guy is inherently unstable. Just give him another 6 months.
I am sure "events dear boy" will prevail.
It is however like being in the relegation zone, nine points from safety with four games in hand and they are all away to top four clubs, none of whom are yet guaranteed a place in Europe.
Perhaps you need to consult your own coments from a few months ago re-Bridgend and the impending Wales Assembly Election. The outcome proved to be a bit 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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
The biggest problems are rip off pricing and poor usability.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
Jeez I try to ignore you but only the most self regarding patronising twat could have written this *and* believe what he's written.
I have to say that you’re extremely shit at ignoring him. Perhaps get a room and have a Women In Love style wrassle off?
Just to be deadly serious for a second, I sense it's my flip style of posting that sometimes irritates the Captain, not so much the actual underlying sentiments.
Eg, this one today, the supposedly 'patronizing' view that the less well off are voting Tory against their economic self-interest, this isn't a million miles away from his oft-stated (and imo correct) Remainiac view that lots of people were fooled into thinking Brexit will make them better off when it will do the opposite.
Anyway, off now, Hard to drag myself away from such a great thread but needs must. I'm going to Waitrose and I promise not to peer into other shoppers' baskets and tell them that I've detected cognitive dissonance - they don't really want to buy that ridiculously overpriced Charlie Bigham steak & ale pie.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
I've been snuffling myself lately so had a look out of interest. But seems too early for limes. London - so plane trees? Other allergogenic trees are available.
Hmm thanks - will take a look. First time either in town or elsewhere. V strange. But thanks.
No guarantee that that particular site is reliable etc., of course, and in any case it seems to be a commercial medical clinic. But the general point is suggestive and worthy of further research.
I wonder if the weather has meant the plants have been saving it up so to speak, like one or two of our PBers waiting for lockdown to ease? Our own local trees have come very suddenly into leaf this last week.
PS ... and pollen everywhere, on all surfaces, floating on the water in the shed water butt, etc.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I have no objection to non-agricultural countryside.
I just don't think its necessary to maintain 70% of land in this country as agricultural countryside.
Nor do I agree with abusing the green belt, not to maintain the countryside, but instead as a weapon to keep houses unaffordable.
The green belt today is twice the size of the green belt in 1979, despite the fact that we have many more population needing housing now so it would be logical to have a smaller belt not a bigger one.
Since 1995 there has actually been a drop in Green Belt land 37,000 hectares.
So more than doubled between 1979 and 1995 and a 2% drop since 1995?
On this one the more than doubling wins as the more relevant stat!
Well if you want to look at Statistics like that, in 1939 there were 11,300,000 houses in Britain serving 41 million people - 3.6 people per house.
There are now 27 million houses serving 68 million people - or 2.5 people per house.
That’s a brilliant statistic, that does more than almost any other to illustrate the problem. I suspect the 1939 figure of 3.6 held up until about 1975.
Interestingly the fertility rate in the United Kingdom collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1915 the fertility rate was 2.84 children per woman, so a couple getting married then would have had themselves plus 3 children for a family of five typically by 1931.
The change in fertility rate alone after that roughly accounts for one person fewer per house for families, so considering increasing divorces etc its somewhat surprising the gap isn't bigger!
It's not true in the slightest. Plenty of GBR trains will serve stations in Scotland and Wales. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the press officer needs to read up on it a bit?
Pause. Breathe. Stop making arrogant fact-free statements.
GBR will not set fares in Scotland. Four of their concessions will operate trains that run to Scotland but the fares there will be set by Scotrail as they are now. Simplification will mean the TOC-only fares being removed, so an end to fares set by Cross Country and LNER for internal Scottish services.
I'm not making any such thing. I haven't mentioned ticketing. I'm merely saying that the claim by the press officer that GBR will "operate only" in England is a nonsense. It is demonstrably untrue. Plenty of GBR trains will operate in Scotland as you yourself point out.
What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
You are dancing on the head of pin. Train services contracted out by GBR are concessions to GBR and WILL serve Scotland. They will carry the GBR brand and arrive into Scottish stations. They will not stop at the border, divest themselves of all their passengers and round-up kilt-wearing locals sitting patiently for a train on the north bank of the River Tweed. Thus GBR will serve Scotland – demonstrably so given that its trains will arrive into Scottish stations.
Ultimately the arbiter is the government who are setting this up. GBR will own the tracks. And thats as far as their influence will go. Its about how you define "operate". GBR is to be an infrastructure business, an expanded Network Rail with responsibility for literally dictating passenger rail operations in England. It is their lack of doing this in Wales and Scotland that the government - who are creating this not you or I - are referring to.
There will be challenges. Already we have seen what will become GBR concessions overloading the infrastructure north of the border. Unless power and capacity upgrades are carried out I can see more than just TPE having to run their bi-modes under the wires on diseasal due to lack of amps, they will just be told no.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I have no objection to non-agricultural countryside.
I just don't think its necessary to maintain 70% of land in this country as agricultural countryside.
Nor do I agree with abusing the green belt, not to maintain the countryside, but instead as a weapon to keep houses unaffordable.
The green belt today is twice the size of the green belt in 1979, despite the fact that we have many more population needing housing now so it would be logical to have a smaller belt not a bigger one.
Since 1995 there has actually been a drop in Green Belt land 37,000 hectares.
So more than doubled between 1979 and 1995 and a 2% drop since 1995?
On this one the more than doubling wins as the more relevant stat!
Well if you want to look at Statistics like that, in 1939 there were 11,300,000 houses in Britain serving 41 million people - 3.6 people per house.
There are now 27 million houses serving 68 million people - or 2.5 people per house.
That’s a brilliant statistic, that does more than almost any other to illustrate the problem. I suspect the 1939 figure of 3.6 held up until about 1975.
Interestingly the fertility rate in the United Kingdom collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1915 the fertility rate was 2.84 children per woman, so a couple getting married then would have had themselves plus 3 children for a family of five typically by 1931.
The change in fertility rate alone after that roughly accounts for one person fewer per house for families, so considering increasing divorces etc its somewhat surprising the gap isn't bigger!
How are holiday homes dealt with, I wonder? Do I get counted twice over if I have a house and a holiday home?
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
Its not just the infrastructure, it is the changes made to how we drive. Right now there are around 90,000 petrol and diesel pumps in the country. Filling up takes 3-4 minutes and there are still regular queues at many stations. The very best electric cars charge at the equivalent of between 30 and 80 miles per hour. So to get the equivalent of filling your car up you would have to charge for somewhere between 5 and 12 hours.
Of course we all hope this will change but right now we are making plans based on technology that doesn't even exist.
And before people go on about home charging, there are large parts of the country where that is just no practical as there is no drive on which to park your car or garage to put it in.
The reason why the Tesla experience is hassle free is that it is a unified network with no faff. Until all of the different operators stop pissing around with stand alone charging systems and setups it will never be a viable solution if we are going to have all cars electrified.
It doesn't take 5-12 hours to charge an electric car now - unless you are using a 13 amp connection.
The service station model will change - which is why the chargers are being put in car parks.
Incidentally, one thing that is being rolled out is lamppost charging - for overnight trickle charging. Since we are converting the street lights to LED, there is surplus of capacity at each lamppost.
Tyne and Wear (/ˌtaɪn ... ˈwɪər/) is a metropolitan county in North East England, situated around the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear. It came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. It consists of the five metropolitan boroughs of Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and the City of Sunderland. The county is bordered to the north by Northumberland, to the south by County Durham and to the east of the county lies the North Sea. It is the smallest county in North East England by area, but by far the largest in terms of population.
Prior to the 1974 reforms, the territory now covered by the county of Tyne and Wear straddled the border between the counties of Northumberland and Durham, the border being marked by the river Tyne; that territory also included five county boroughs.
Tyne and Wear County Council, based at Sandyford House, was abolished in 1986 along with the other metropolitan county councils in England by the Local Government Act 1985, and so its districts (the metropolitan boroughs) have since functioned effectively as unitary authorities. However, the metropolitan county continues to exist in law and as a geographic frame of reference,[3][4][5] and as a ceremonial county.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
Depends if you are sensitive and to what.
I have an asthma diagnosis, and am sensitive to some tree pollen at its height sometimes.
And lime is very productive (listen to the insects buzzing).
So .. possible.
Keep drinking water if you feel dusty, and wait a day or two.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
The biggest problems are rip off pricing and poor usability.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
Price - yes. 69p a kWh for Ionity. When modern shite like the VW id3/4 is doing 2.something miles per kWh thats a ludicrous running cost. Yes you can get this down to 45p or 25p a kWh if you pay them a subscription but you need to do a LOT of miles to make that sensible vs petrol
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
Yes, if you're alergic, but it could be lots of other things too.
The route along the river through Fulham, Hammersmith and Chiswick down to Richmond is very nice.
I could be scarred by that route as it is an acknowledged final practice marathon trip (18 miles from wherever to wherever past the bridges).
I have recently taken to cycling (not today, and at a more sedate pace) along the canal out to Acton. It's great and really interesting to see the people, the boats with their firewood and coal piled on top, and the variety of those boats. Some of the time the water is scummy but often it's a delight.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
I've been snuffling myself lately so had a look out of interest. But seems too early for limes. London - so plane trees? Other allergogenic trees are available.
Hmm thanks - will take a look. First time either in town or elsewhere. V strange. But thanks.
No guarantee that that particular site is reliable etc., of course, and in any case it seems to be a commercial medical clinic. But the general point is suggestive and worthy of further research.
I wonder if the weather has meant the plants have been saving it up so to speak, like one or two of our PBers waiting for lockdown to ease? Our own local trees have come very suddenly into leaf this last week.
PS ... and pollen everywhere, on all surfaces, floating on the water in the shed water butt, etc.
Yes good point the pollen could just have said enough is enough.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Gateshead hasn't been in County Durham for almost half a century.
Get over it.
Try going to Barnoldswick and telling the locals that they aren't in Yorkshire. They've got a bloody big flagpole in the middle of the town with a Yorkshire flag fluttering away.
Just because a bunch of ageing trainspotters say something is true doesn't make it so. Sorry.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
I have no objection to non-agricultural countryside.
I just don't think its necessary to maintain 70% of land in this country as agricultural countryside.
Nor do I agree with abusing the green belt, not to maintain the countryside, but instead as a weapon to keep houses unaffordable.
The green belt today is twice the size of the green belt in 1979, despite the fact that we have many more population needing housing now so it would be logical to have a smaller belt not a bigger one.
Since 1995 there has actually been a drop in Green Belt land 37,000 hectares.
So more than doubled between 1979 and 1995 and a 2% drop since 1995?
On this one the more than doubling wins as the more relevant stat!
Well if you want to look at Statistics like that, in 1939 there were 11,300,000 houses in Britain serving 41 million people - 3.6 people per house.
There are now 27 million houses serving 68 million people - or 2.5 people per house.
That’s a brilliant statistic, that does more than almost any other to illustrate the problem. I suspect the 1939 figure of 3.6 held up until about 1975.
Interestingly the fertility rate in the United Kingdom collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1915 the fertility rate was 2.84 children per woman, so a couple getting married then would have had themselves plus 3 children for a family of five typically by 1931.
The change in fertility rate alone after that roughly accounts for one person fewer per house for families, so considering increasing divorces etc its somewhat surprising the gap isn't bigger!
How are holiday homes dealt with, I wonder? Do I get counted twice over if I have a house and a holiday home?
I am not sure, but if each property is in a marginal Conservative constituency, I think you get to vote Tory twice.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
If they own the track, run some of the services, and have stations in Scotland then surely by any normal definition of the word operate GBR will be operating in Scotland.
Yes, in Rochdale's world if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a Scottish Wildcat.
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.
We shouldn't.
I sometimes think you’d be happier moving to Coruscant. No green space, big buildings everywhere, the best political intrigue in the galaxy...
That's what those advocating piling people high in cities, while we keep the countryside (or "their view") unspoilt want. That's the opposite of what I am proposing.
I am saying there should be more green space, more trees, more gardens, more parks where people LIVE, not just in fields that nobody ever goes to, are totally uneconomic, and are only ever seen from the sky.
Besides I've said all along if you want an unspoilt view then buy your view. Not one person has come up with an objection to that.
I agree that we have too much ordinary under-utilised scrub or pasture land that could be much better used, rather than being mechanically mowed. Far too great a distance between hedgerows and those that are there, cut far too frequently and aggressively.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean concreting over with roads, houses with patios. We have a shortage of housing in some parts of the country. But just about everywhere we have a shortage of quality hedgerow, woodland, wetland and wildflower meadow, all of which are important from a biodiversity and carbon perspective.
Your complete disinterest in this with a sole focus on building building building is completely at odds with the direction of both politicians and the public mood.
If building is so at odds why is there so much demand for housing? Why are prices so high? Why do new houses get bought from the plots before they're even built and have people moving in the day they're ready?
It's at odds with the selfish shits who want unspoilt views but don't want to pay to buy those views. Again, if you buy your own view then that's it, discussion over, if you don't then jog on.
I have done so.
Fantastic. That's the free market solution.
Now if you get a tempting offer that says I will give you ££££ for some of that land to be built on, then in my view that should be between you as the owner and the prospective buyers. Nobody else.
I am paying with my own money to boost biodiversity on some poorly managed land that is not particularly suitable for housing for a number of reasons. It is not a scaleable answer to the problem.
Like you I am using almost all of my spare money In reverting paddock to flower meadow and open woodland to improve biodiversity. My land serves as an important bridge between two nature reserves so I am getting a lot of advice from the Lincs Wildlife Trust on how to do things.
Sadly it strikes me that Philip displays an astonishing degree of almost wilful ignorance of the importance of proper non-agricultural countryside in his desperate desire for never ending development. And that is the issue - in his world it really is never ending and nothing can stand in the way of building. It is a genuinely stupid philosophy.
Indeed. I thought we'd discovered that green space was vital during the lockdown?
I'm also involved in managing more than one site for wildlife (wetland & bog) as my other half is an ecologist. The idea that we should just turn the place into urban sprawl is bonkers.
Philip's mentality has reached our local Labour mayor though. She hated the sight of sheep on the approach to the town (she thought it made the place look backward) and the sheep field is now a massive empty (ie built speculatively) warehouse. A great improvement, I must say.
Planning policy is quite strong on green space. Local Councils can designate areas without doing the whole Green Belt fandango.
And afaik (every one i know does it) 10% of space on housing developments over 0.4 Ha (=1 acre) is required to be Open Space. Or you have to pay money to provide it somewhere nearby. That's been policy for donkeys' years.
The first is in the NPPF. The second is the reality in every Council I have ever checked.
Jeez I try to ignore you but only the most self regarding patronising twat could have written this *and* believe what he's written.
I have to say that you’re extremely shit at ignoring him. Perhaps get a room and have a Women In Love style wrassle off?
Just to be deadly serious for a second, I sense it's my flip style of posting that sometimes irritates the Captain, not so much the actual underlying sentiments.
Eg, this one today, the supposedly 'patronizing' view that the less well off are voting Tory against their economic self-interest, this isn't a million miles away from his oft-stated (and imo correct) Remainiac view that lots of people were fooled into thinking Brexit will make them better off when it will do the opposite.
Anyway, off now, Hard to drag myself away from such a great thread but needs must. I'm going to Waitrose and I promise not to peer into other shoppers' baskets and tell them that I've detected cognitive dissonance - they don't really want to buy that ridiculously overpriced Charlie Bigham steak & ale pie.
I could never go along with a flip style of posting that sometimes irritates people..
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
1. I'm a bloke and 2. I never contended the above. As Leon said, a complete straw man by you.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
GBR will not operate trains in England either. Or anywhere. As they are not going to be a train operator.
Just like London Overground isn't a train operator? I mean, your pedantry is ludicrous even by the stupefying standards of PB.
We have just been advised that hybrid working will be the new normal going forward, with staff in the office, on average, 50% of the time.
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
It has been a tough year for new starters. There are several of my colleagues who I have not yet met in person.
New starters have had it tough this year, as have sales people trying to build relationships virtually.
It’s going to be a very interesting social experiment to see what work and living patterns look like going forward. CFOs the world over have seen the scope for massive savings in office costs and travel budgets, and workers have realised that if they only have to be in the office a couple of days a week or one week a month, they can live a long way from the office.
I suspect the new GB Rail are going to need to start putting on a lot more 5am routes south from Newcastle and east from Devon.
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
++++++
Sympathies. I reckon we will discover lots of downsides to "hybrid working" exactly like this. We have rushed into epochal changes without properly thinking
I'm over 7 months into a new job. I have yet to meet anyone physically. My role has a European focus so who knows when I will actually be able to travel and meet face to face.
Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.
A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
The biggest problems are rip off pricing and poor usability.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
Price - yes. 69p a kWh for Ionity. When modern shite like the VW id3/4 is doing 2.something miles per kWh thats a ludicrous running cost. Yes you can get this down to 45p or 25p a kWh if you pay them a subscription but you need to do a LOT of miles to make that sensible vs petrol
Early adopters always get caned - but they are generally the wealthiest anyway, so it's not the most massive of problems.
GBR will not operate in Scotland. So says the government who are creating it. Train services contracted out by GBR will. There is a difference! You gave a TGV example - a French train crossing into Italy doesn't mean that SNCF operate Italian train services.
If they own the track, run some of the services, and have stations in Scotland then surely by any normal definition of the word operate GBR will be operating in Scotland.
Yes, in Rochdale's world if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a Scottish Wildcat.
But we are here in the railway world. A Train Operating Company is the specific legal title for a company which actually runs trains.
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
1. I'm a bloke and 2. I never contended the above. As Leon said, a complete straw man by you.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
GBR will not operate trains in England either. Or anywhere. As they are not going to be a train operator.
Just like London Overground isn't a train operator? I mean, your pedantry is ludicrous even by the stupefying standards of PB.
London Overground is devolved. Like Scotrail, TfW etc it will not be under the remit of GBR. Its timetable, its fares, its responsibility will be nothing to do with GBR.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
Rushcliffe is probably more Gosforth.
In the Nottingham context Gateshead would be Derby
Derby is separate from Nottingham, albeit not too far away.
I am explaining to her what the set-up is. Train operator x in one country extending services into another country is not the same as that operator running things in that second country.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
1. I'm a bloke and 2. I never contended the above. As Leon said, a complete straw man by you.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
GBR will not operate trains in England either. Or anywhere. As they are not going to be a train operator.
Just like London Overground isn't a train operator? I mean, your pedantry is ludicrous even by the stupefying standards of PB.
London Overground is devolved. Like Scotrail, TfW etc it will not be under the remit of GBR. Its timetable, its fares, its responsibility will be nothing to do with GBR.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
A good article, and it’s striking just how far the Midlands has shifted. Traditional marginal seats like Burton, Nuneaton, N W Leics are now very solidly Conservative.
The reverse is middle class urban and university seats shifting left at a rate of knots, and not just left, but far left. One could imagine the Greens eventually gaining some from Labour.
Though seats suchas Gedling, Wolverhampton SW and Edgbaston are far less Tory than in the past. Ken Clarke's retirement might see Rushcliffe drift the same way.
Tory vote share in Rushcliffe down to 2001 levels (when Blair won his second landslide). 47.5%
Rushcliffe is really part of Nottingham City.
Though announce that in the centre of it, and you will be run out of town by a lynch-mob.
Sounds like Gateshead
We are in a different county, not just a different town.
Gateshead - in a First Class County Newcastle - in a minor county
Gateshead hasn't been in County Durham for almost half a century.
Get over it.
Try going to Barnoldswick and telling the locals that they aren't in Yorkshire. They've got a bloody big flagpole in the middle of the town with a Yorkshire flag fluttering away.
Just because a bunch of ageing trainspotters say something is true doesn't make it so. Sorry.
Just because local government boundaries say something is true doesn't make it so either.
We used to be perfectly comfortable with this. No-one objected to Sheffield being in Yorkshire or Oldham being in Lancashire before the 70s, even though the repsective county councils had no say over those towns.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
The biggest problems are rip off pricing and poor usability.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
The difference is nowhere near as big as it was even 12 months ago. As long you've got accounts with ecotricity and PolarPlus you're fine.
BMW, Merc, Ford and VAG are collaborating on the Europe wide Ionity charging network specifically to destroy Tesla's competitive advantage in that area.
Tesla aren't in trouble yet but VAG in particular are coming for them very hard.
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.
Which green targets are the unrealistic ones?
Getting rid of all new Petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I am not sure anyone has yet clocked what a massive change that will mean to our lives unless we start to see some of these technological breakthroughs we are promised.
Haven't you just given the Government the benefit of another 5 years to achieve their unrealistic target? 2030?
Yes - it's 2030.
Not sure how unrealistic I would call that. Though I would go with "demanding".
Pure electric car sales have jumped from 1% to 6% in 2 years.
In about five years electric cars ought to be significantly cheaper to manufacture than their ICE equivalents. The market will then do much of the rest, and if government doesn't provide for the charging infrastructure, whether directly or by subsidy/coercion, it will suffer the consequences.
There's actually rather alot of work on charging infrastructure happening at the moment. Billions being spent on it. Just not very sexy as a news story.
Of course. Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off. It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
The biggest problems are rip off pricing and poor usability.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
Price - yes. 69p a kWh for Ionity. When modern shite like the VW id3/4 is doing 2.something miles per kWh thats a ludicrous running cost. Yes you can get this down to 45p or 25p a kWh if you pay them a subscription but you need to do a LOT of miles to make that sensible vs petrol
One thing that is a definite positive about Elon Musk is his actually getting things done.
When I worked in the oil industry, the green side of the business was growing and taken quite seriously inside the company. When we tried to get manufacturers to commit to making some hydrogen powered cars, it was always "not yet, a few more years". Which meant that we had prototype hydrogen filling stations that could never be sorted out properly, because we didn't have production grade cars to work with.
With charging infrastructure the car manufacturers always said "oh yes, and we'll need someone to build charging infrastructure. Someday".
Tesla *just* built the Supercharger network. And now the idiots are complaining it only serves Tesla vehicles....
Comments
The more important question is will it result in a better service.....
He was a meticulous timekeeper. One day he missed the bus. By the time he had could get the next bus, his shift had gone down - and were killed in an explosion.
If he hadn't missed that bus - no thread header.
In the Nottingham context Gateshead would be Derby
I'm in favour of protecting the non-agricultural countryside; forests and other areas of outstanding natural beauty etc I have agreed should be protected. As the exception not the norm.
Intensive farming fields that nobody besides a farmer can go into, that take up 70% of the countries land and generate 0.61% of GDP? Some of that can be better used, with the farmers paid handsomely no doubt for their land.
We've currently got 5% of the UK dedicated to housing, 70% for agricultural fields. If we went to 6% and 69% then that would increase the space for housing by 20%, while reducing agricultural land by 1.4% and reducing agricultures contribution to GDP potentially by 0.008%
Gateshead - in a First Class County
Newcastle - in a minor county
I found out today that my induction, etc in my new job will be all virtual. I'm a little disappointed to be honest — it's going to be very lonely!
++++++
Sympathies. I reckon we will discover lots of downsides to "hybrid working" exactly like this. We have rushed into epochal changes without properly thinking
What a needlessly aggressive and inaccurate post by you.
leantossup.ca calls Batley for Cons (64% chance)
You write the report saying it should come down, we'll say we can't do it at the moment, and we'll tell our donors we never will if they keep the money flowing.
It's virtue-signalling all round.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/black-fungus-kills-90-recovered-covid-patients-india-infections/
The boundaries of Nottingham are almost as bonkers as those of Newcastle. As those snivelling Notts County fans why they sing: "One team in Nott'm..."
Perhaps it should run the ferries to the Scottish Islands too given the disaster the SNP have made of running those.
The economics of the strike baffled me then and baffled me still.
Government: we can't afford to carry on subsidising the extraction of coal. We'll have to close down pits and import it.
Miners: if you do that, we'll stop working.
Government: er, ok.
(I know this is highly oversimplified, but still.)
You can only really strike if you are doing something where the economics are in your favour. This is why school strikes never achieved anything.
A friend of mine was a mining engineer who had to keep a mine going during the strike. He was attacked and beaten up on his way to the colliery.
The mob later descended on the offices and the management had to retreat to a corridor and arm themselves with iron bars on the grounds that 'they can only come at us one at a time'.
Without him and a few others the pit would have quickly become unrecoverable, so I'm not sure what the NUM lot actually wanted.
And people think the Brexit wars were bad...
They could quite feasibly call it that. Why not? French trains operate in Italy and vice versa. It's an English state-run railway that crosses borders, just like most other European state-run railways.
GBR will manage the INFRASTRUCTURE in England, Wales and Scotland. It will not operate the trains in Wales and Scotland nor set the fares nor make the timetables as those are devolved. The PM's spokesperson is right that GBR will not be the train operator in the devolved nations - that doesn't mean English GBR trains can't run into that area. But they won't run things across the border. Even the timetable those services run to will be with the agreement of the devolved operators - they can't just turn up when they want to.
Let's see how they get on - Canadian pollsters don't have a flawless record - particularly in Scottish referendums ..
Get over it.
There are reasonable reasons to anticipate that Johnsonism, like Berlusconismo, will do the country significant harm in the medium-to-long term. But to argue that is to be, at best, a doomster and a gloomster. At worst, it's to be an unpatriot who wants the country to fail.
But whilst it's execrable government, it's excellent short term electoral politics, and blooming difficult to oppose.
The worst May of my life, for weather. As far as I can recall. What a year to choose
https://twitter.com/ScotsmanPaddy/status/1393712629873528832?s=20
Their predictions, in Canada, the USA and the UK have been uncannily accurate.
This was their 2019 prediction, Tory majority 82: https://twitter.com/leantossup/status/1204458179528142855
Not bad, not bad at all! Only real error was overestimating the Lib Dems.
Have just been for a bike ride. London (not central). Caned it around leafy west London and have come back gagging* as though something, dust or something, is in my throat. All is good now, so did a bit of turbo google and someone mentioned Lime trees can do this. Can they?
*No melons were involved.
It is however like being in the relegation zone, nine points from safety with four games in hand and they are all away to top four clubs, none of whom are yet guaranteed a place in Europe.
The claim that GBR "won't operate in Scotland" is demonstrably untrue – it's trains will serve Scottish stations, just as they will serve stations in Wales.
Be interesting to see how adequate it is when the numbers really start to take off.
It's not the most complex of problems, so it might well be fine.
Derby is separate from Nottingham, albeit not too far away.
Gateshead is in County Durham. It is not administered by Durham County Council. Which is not the same thing at all. Nor is 1974 the year you are looking for - Gateshead became a county borough in the 1880s.
https://www.ukallergy.com/pollen-allergy-peak-seasons-in-the-uk/
Of course we all hope this will change but right now we are making plans based on technology that doesn't even exist.
And before people go on about home charging, there are large parts of the country where that is just no practical as there is no drive on which to park your car or garage to put it in.
The route along the river through Fulham, Hammersmith and Chiswick down to Richmond is very nice.
The difference between the Tesla superchargers and the other systems as a user experience is massive. With Tesla, plug in and go, pretty much. With the others, lots of fiddling around seems to be required.
Eg, this one today, the supposedly 'patronizing' view that the less well off are voting Tory against their economic self-interest, this isn't a million miles away from his oft-stated (and imo correct) Remainiac view that lots of people were fooled into thinking Brexit will make them better off when it will do the opposite.
Anyway, off now, Hard to drag myself away from such a great thread but needs must. I'm going to Waitrose and I promise not to peer into other shoppers' baskets and tell them that I've detected cognitive dissonance - they don't really want to buy that ridiculously overpriced Charlie Bigham steak & ale pie.
I wonder if the weather has meant the plants have been saving it up so to speak, like one or two of our PBers waiting for lockdown to ease? Our own local trees have come very suddenly into leaf this last week.
PS ... and pollen everywhere, on all surfaces, floating on the water in the shed water butt, etc.
The change in fertility rate alone after that roughly accounts for one person fewer per house for families, so considering increasing divorces etc its somewhat surprising the gap isn't bigger!
There will be challenges. Already we have seen what will become GBR concessions overloading the infrastructure north of the border. Unless power and capacity upgrades are carried out I can see more than just TPE having to run their bi-modes under the wires on diseasal due to lack of amps, they will just be told no.
Nope. It's in Tyne & Wear, which has been a ceremonial county since... er... 1974. As a two-second google would tell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear
The service station model will change - which is why the chargers are being put in car parks.
Incidentally, one thing that is being rolled out is lamppost charging - for overnight trickle charging. Since we are converting the street lights to LED, there is surplus of capacity at each lamppost.
Prior to the 1974 reforms, the territory now covered by the county of Tyne and Wear straddled the border between the counties of Northumberland and Durham, the border being marked by the river Tyne; that territory also included five county boroughs.
Tyne and Wear County Council, based at Sandyford House, was abolished in 1986 along with the other metropolitan county councils in England by the Local Government Act 1985, and so its districts (the metropolitan boroughs) have since functioned effectively as unitary authorities. However, the metropolitan county continues to exist in law and as a geographic frame of reference,[3][4][5] and as a ceremonial county.
I have an asthma diagnosis, and am sensitive to some tree pollen at its height sometimes.
And lime is very productive (listen to the insects buzzing).
So .. possible.
Keep drinking water if you feel dusty, and wait a day or two.
I have recently taken to cycling (not today, and at a more sedate pace) along the canal out to Acton. It's great and really interesting to see the people, the boats with their firewood and coal piled on top, and the variety of those boats. Some of the time the water is scummy but often it's a delight.
Yes, in Rochdale's world if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a Scottish Wildcat.
And afaik (every one i know does it) 10% of space on housing developments over 0.4 Ha (=1 acre) is required to be Open Space. Or you have to pay money to provide it somewhere nearby. That's been policy for donkeys' years.
The first is in the NPPF. The second is the reality in every Council I have ever checked.
Speaking about England.
It’s going to be a very interesting social experiment to see what work and living patterns look like going forward. CFOs the world over have seen the scope for massive savings in office costs and travel budgets, and workers have realised that if they only have to be in the office a couple of days a week or one week a month, they can live a long way from the office.
I suspect the new GB Rail are going to need to start putting on a lot more 5am routes south from Newcastle and east from Devon.
A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.
We used to be perfectly comfortable with this. No-one objected to Sheffield being in Yorkshire or Oldham being in Lancashire before the 70s, even though the repsective county councils had no say over those towns.
BMW, Merc, Ford and VAG are collaborating on the Europe wide Ionity charging network specifically to destroy Tesla's competitive advantage in that area.
Tesla aren't in trouble yet but VAG in particular are coming for them very hard.
When I worked in the oil industry, the green side of the business was growing and taken quite seriously inside the company. When we tried to get manufacturers to commit to making some hydrogen powered cars, it was always "not yet, a few more years". Which meant that we had prototype hydrogen filling stations that could never be sorted out properly, because we didn't have production grade cars to work with.
With charging infrastructure the car manufacturers always said "oh yes, and we'll need someone to build charging infrastructure. Someday".
Tesla *just* built the Supercharger network. And now the idiots are complaining it only serves Tesla vehicles....
🏴 235,979 1st doses / 309,020 2nd doses
🏴 12,265 / 37,684
🏴 12,095 / 13,396
NI 4,519 / 8,918