As soon as governments start talking about listening you know they are fucked. We all remember the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul that was the last days of Gormless Brown's reign of terror. There was a lot of 'listening' going on then too.
Further to the discussion of my point about planning and Jenrick, I see Telegraph website already awash with calls for change to the proposals and for Boris to listen and so on.
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
That mallet is so small. Bit cringey tbh
Looks like a really naff copycat of what Boris did with his wall already.
Go big or go home, is anyone impressed with a second-hand joke being done in a tiny manner?
Thankfully for the Tories, the solution is pretty straightforward. Replace Boris with almost anyone else and they would be much better placed in home-county-type fights.
Compare that with Labour's troubles, which currently feels like move left and lose votes, move right and lose votes.
Why would they give up all the red wall leave seats for a few southern Remain seats.
They should happily give up on a few urban London commuter seats for the much richer pickings in the Midlands and North.
In that respect Boris is a winner. Batley and Spen will be a tory gain.
I don't know about Batley & Spen. But, in general, the trade of Home Counties' and London Remain votes for gains in the North and Midlands works very much in the Conservatives' favour. The Conservatives need 335 seats for a working majority. It matters little where those 335 seats are located.
There is nothing in this to worry the Tories with any new problems,
Glorious complacency.
I've observed the rise and fall of many regimes over the years from a detached and objective perspective. I always love it when the diehards claim there's nothing to worry about.
Peak Boris passed on May 25th. It's all downhill now. Many people will enjoy the slide.
Gallowgate">My long-term goal is to do a self build somewhere in Northumberland. Nothing fancy, just a normal house with a bit of land.
'.......A future tory voter, there......'
I think I’m far too woke to vote Tory
Its amazing, Mr G. how attitudes change when you become a property owner!
Deserving welfare cases become scrounging layabouts overnight. You becomes strangely attracted to the headlines in the Daily Telegraph. And yes maybe you ARE paying a lot of tax!
None of those things happened to me when I became a property owner, even when I'd paid off my mortgage.
As soon as governments start talking about listening you know they are fucked. We all remember the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul that was the last days of Gormless Brown's reign of terror. There was a lot of 'listening' going on then too.
I will hear no ill word said against the man who stopped Blair from taking us into the €.
As soon as governments start talking about listening you know they are fucked. We all remember the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul that was the last days of Gormless Brown's reign of terror. There was a lot of 'listening' going on then too.
I will hear no ill word said against the man who stopped Blair from taking us into the €.
I don't think it was him. It was the good sense and judgement of the British people. Had they been more in favour, he wouldn't have been able to stop Blair.
Also back then we had an opposition that bothered to oppose.
As soon as governments start talking about listening you know they are fucked. We all remember the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul that was the last days of Gormless Brown's reign of terror. There was a lot of 'listening' going on then too.
I will hear no ill word said against the man who stopped Blair from taking us into the €.
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
As I suggested earlier: Jenrick gone in next reshuffle and some kind of 'review' of planning changes.
And yet the LDs were in Parliament yesterday calling for more immigration for low skilled low wage jobs. Because supporting that while opposing planning will do the housing market wonders. 🤦♂️
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I would suggest that the planning changes are not going to change very much. We don't know yet what they are but they look like procedural changes as to how land gets allocated for development through the local plan process, to try and speed it all up. Green Belt, AONB's etc will in all likelihood remain as they are and will in all reality probably be even more protected. The biggest problem as I see it is that they are trying to restructure the system too quickly, to try and get it all done in one parliament for political reasons.
The problem is that people who have plundered in to this, including Dominic Cummings, failed to see the difficulties. Cummings was sent to look at planning in his later days as an advisor, possibly they just wanted to direct his energy in to an intractable problem with no solutions so he exhausted himself.
Actually they are going to change a great deal and not for the better.
The changes are not primarily designed to make it easier to get planning permissions or get more houses built. That is another myth. What they do is sweep away the Thatcherite planning reforms of the 1980s and 90s which ensured that planning included environmental and other controls so that development is not as damaging as it once was.
So the PPG system that Thatcher created did not stop anyone building houses, nor did it make it easier for NIMBYs to prevent development. It ensured that when houses were built there was proper environmental and archaeological mitigation, proper investigation and preserving - either in situ or by recording - of historical features, alternative locations for sensitive environmental concerns. It also ensured there were proper transport and telecommunications links, that there was mitigation against noise, against pollution and against flooding and that there were the open spaces and amenities to make communities rather than dormitories. It basically made sure that the houses that were built were not created at an excessive cost to the existing environment in all its forms and that they were fit to live in (beyond just the basic structural elements) for those buying them.
Much of that has been swept away with the planning revisions. These are not aimed at making it easier to get permissions, they are aimed at making it cheaper for developers to build poorer houses with fewer controls and far more impact on the environment. We are building the slums of tomorrow.
Well. The planning bill hasn't yet been published, so you are ahead of the entire industry with this analysis.
Your comments just about make sense if they are a criticism of planning reform since 2012 (ie the NPPF and permitted development rights) which did replace the previous system of PPG's and PPS's. What really changed at this point though was the political removal of regional government and regional planning through which a lot of strategic large scale development was being driven.
It may not have been published in its final form but I have seen much of the consultation material and also had sight of the plans for specific areas such as the downgrading of archaeological protections (removing the need for pre-construction assessments, watching briefs and rescue archaeology) and environmental protections (removing the need for mitigations such as building alternative habitats and conducting impact studies).
The NPPF system was not as good as the old PPG system but it did retain much of the basic assumptions and practices - I know as I have operated under both systems. What is being said at all levels of the new proposals is that much of the sensible protection put in place by the PPG system in the 80s and 90s and carried forward by the NPPF system is to be weakened or scrapped.
Out of interest, what material have you been looking at? Where is the proposal to downgrade archaeology and environmental protections?
Consultation documents being circulated by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists amongst others.
In some ways it is already too late. The Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 already prevents local authorities from imposing pre-commencement conditions on planning applications without developer agreement. This basically means that the developer can refuse to have archaeological or environmental mitigations included in the planning permission and the only authority the council has is to refuse permission entirely. But the ability to refuse permission is also taken away from the council in many cases so the developer just has to hold out and they get permission anyway.
I'll be interested to see it.
In my view consultees need cutting down to size quite significantly - particularly perhaps archaeology and bats, and the default way in which reports can be required sometimes without justification because it is the "safe" option for the Planning Officer.
It's not the safe option of a Planning Officer, they are usually required.
Most planning officers would prefer not to spend half their live chasing up reports that are required but aren't someone else's priority. The simple fact is they need to turn things round in 8 weeks so it makes sense to get as much as possible provided as early as possible.
And what a weird quote about the Chilterns. "The [Chiltern] district council failed to make a local plan, leaving the area extra vulnerable to a developers free for all in the green belt."
I'm not from the area, but I would have thought a logical solution to that would be to make a local plan. That makes the not having a local plan problem go away surely?
That quote is tricky as 4 councils were merged in April 2020, and no one gets a local plan created and approved in less than about 3 years.
I'm not convinced that this is less control for local people. The Local Plan will still be a consulted Council Document. And Zonal is I think a small step towards a more European style system - it i too big for me to have followed in real detail. Try Nabavi.
CPRE are mainly bullshit merchants.
Well, councils were required to develop Local Plans well before 2020 - and having a draft plan, even if unapproved, would allow a council to use it when deciding applications. At the merger, each district's local plan would continue to have force in its area until a new plan was developed. My local council, not one of the quickest, got to a draft plan by 2018; it's really unforgivable for a planning authority not to get at least that far.
Richard Tyndall has it right on this - the Local Plan will be no more than a facade in the proposed new system, it hands nearly all the (remaining) power to the developers.
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
Thankfully for the Tories, the solution is pretty straightforward. Replace Boris with almost anyone else and they would be much better placed in home-county-type fights.
Compare that with Labour's troubles, which currently feels like move left and lose votes, move right and lose votes.
Why would they give up all the red wall leave seats for a few southern Remain seats.
They should happily give up on a few urban London commuter seats for the much richer pickings in the Midlands and North.
In that respect Boris is a winner. Batley and Spen will be a tory gain.
I don't know about Batley & Spen. But, in general, the trade of Home Counties' and London Remain votes for gains in the North and Midlands works very much in the Conservatives' favour. The Conservatives need 335 seats for a working majority. It matters little where those 335 seats are located.
This is very true. But necessitates a completely different membership, funding stream, ideology and policies. Not a problem if you are just a Blue Team fan. But it is if you have any political beliefs.
No it doesn't. Tory policy constantly evolves, and there is nothing anti Tory about wanting a strong national middling sort aspirational base. Capitalism + state intervention is an ancient Tory ideology. Levelling up has been rightly borrowed from Labour who abandoned it in favour of their unpleasant mixture of elites patronising the poor while describing the centre right as 'scum' and 'vermin'.
That would work. But state intervention really is an "ancient" Tory ideology. It has been 40+ years since it has been regarded as anything other than anathema and evil poison. You may be comfortable with it, but the entire membership, voters and funders aren't aware they've always been at war with East Asia. So there will be significant churn.
Curious government video - which explains why Boris Johnson didn’t succeed at the G7 to secure so many of his COP goals - the PM didn’t get what he wanted in climate financing nor end dates for high polluting activities
Villiers: 'This by-election result should pave the way for a reduction in housing targets for the London suburbs and the south east. We need a fairer distribution of new homes across the country, rather than seeking to cram so many thousands more into the crowded south."
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
That mallet is so small. Bit cringey tbh
I like it. Silly, but enthusiastic.
With all those LibDems standing behind anything larger risked knocking them out. Which would've generated an entirely different meme.
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
OK, OK, this is Dom C going off on one, but a) he was right about this question, wasn't he? b) why did he work so hard to get "a gaffe machine clueless about policy & government" a huge majority?
7/ Pundits: not doing ANeil 'a huge campaign blunder' Me: why the fu*k wd be put a gaffe machine clueless about policy & government up to be grilled for ages, upside=0 for what?! This is not a hard decision... Pundits don't understand comms, power or management. Tune out!
Ah, the central paradox of DC. Total disdain for the politicians he works so hard to get into power.
I think he just enjoys solving the puzzle of “hacking” elections more than he cares to admit - it feeds his ego to work out how to prod the electorate “just so” & confound his opponents. What he’s actually campaining for is beside the point.
Brexit, the Uncivil War, was just fantastic about that and much else. How anyone thought this man would run a government in a consensual, team like fashion is simply beyond me. But he is interesting.
And what a weird quote about the Chilterns. "The [Chiltern] district council failed to make a local plan, leaving the area extra vulnerable to a developers free for all in the green belt."
I'm not from the area, but I would have thought a logical solution to that would be to make a local plan. That makes the not having a local plan problem go away surely?
That quote is tricky as 4 councils were merged in April 2020, and no one gets a local plan created and approved in less than about 3 years.
I'm not convinced that this is less control for local people. The Local Plan will still be a consulted Council Document. And Zonal is I think a small step towards a more European style system - it i too big for me to have followed in real detail. Try Nabavi.
CPRE are mainly bullshit merchants.
Well, councils were required to develop Local Plans well before 2020 - and having a draft plan, even if unapproved, would allow a council to use it when deciding applications. At the merger, each district's local plan would continue to have force in its area until a new plan was developed. My local council, not one of the quickest, got to a draft plan by 2018; it's really unforgivable for a planning authority not to get at least that far.
Richard Tyndall has it right on this - the Local Plan will be no more than a facade in the proposed new system, it hands nearly all the (remaining) power to the developers.
The particular context was the quote on the LD leaflet.
As I say, I haven't read all the stuff on the Planning Reforms. So all comment on that is interesting.
On Local Plans (I did much wrestling with our local SHLAA back in 2007-2012) and so on - istm that the tough nut for the Govt to resolve is to create a way of making local councils take responsibility for the housing required, and deciding where it should be built - whilst closing off the possibility for Councils to simply slope shoulders on the unpopular bits and blame someone else such as the Govt.
It can't all be left up to Local Council as then NIMBYs will dominate. To me there is too much emphasis on people buying new houses paying for things that fit better into the local Council Tax.
Local Plans have been a thing for a long time - the first one I am familiar with for my Council was around 2002 (and that was a Review of an earlier one), but I would need to read back to find out when they came in in law.
I think there are plenty of things that can be changed to mitigate the need for housebuilding - encouraging more density of occupation for example.
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
As I suggested earlier: Jenrick gone in next reshuffle and some kind of 'review' of planning changes.
And yet the LDs were in Parliament yesterday calling for more immigration for low skilled low wage jobs. Because supporting that while opposing planning will do the housing market wonders. 🤦♂️
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I would suggest that the planning changes are not going to change very much. We don't know yet what they are but they look like procedural changes as to how land gets allocated for development through the local plan process, to try and speed it all up. Green Belt, AONB's etc will in all likelihood remain as they are and will in all reality probably be even more protected. The biggest problem as I see it is that they are trying to restructure the system too quickly, to try and get it all done in one parliament for political reasons.
The problem is that people who have plundered in to this, including Dominic Cummings, failed to see the difficulties. Cummings was sent to look at planning in his later days as an advisor, possibly they just wanted to direct his energy in to an intractable problem with no solutions so he exhausted himself.
Actually they are going to change a great deal and not for the better.
The changes are not primarily designed to make it easier to get planning permissions or get more houses built. That is another myth. What they do is sweep away the Thatcherite planning reforms of the 1980s and 90s which ensured that planning included environmental and other controls so that development is not as damaging as it once was.
So the PPG system that Thatcher created did not stop anyone building houses, nor did it make it easier for NIMBYs to prevent development. It ensured that when houses were built there was proper environmental and archaeological mitigation, proper investigation and preserving - either in situ or by recording - of historical features, alternative locations for sensitive environmental concerns. It also ensured there were proper transport and telecommunications links, that there was mitigation against noise, against pollution and against flooding and that there were the open spaces and amenities to make communities rather than dormitories. It basically made sure that the houses that were built were not created at an excessive cost to the existing environment in all its forms and that they were fit to live in (beyond just the basic structural elements) for those buying them.
Much of that has been swept away with the planning revisions. These are not aimed at making it easier to get permissions, they are aimed at making it cheaper for developers to build poorer houses with fewer controls and far more impact on the environment. We are building the slums of tomorrow.
Well. The planning bill hasn't yet been published, so you are ahead of the entire industry with this analysis.
Your comments just about make sense if they are a criticism of planning reform since 2012 (ie the NPPF and permitted development rights) which did replace the previous system of PPG's and PPS's. What really changed at this point though was the political removal of regional government and regional planning through which a lot of strategic large scale development was being driven.
It may not have been published in its final form but I have seen much of the consultation material and also had sight of the plans for specific areas such as the downgrading of archaeological protections (removing the need for pre-construction assessments, watching briefs and rescue archaeology) and environmental protections (removing the need for mitigations such as building alternative habitats and conducting impact studies).
The NPPF system was not as good as the old PPG system but it did retain much of the basic assumptions and practices - I know as I have operated under both systems. What is being said at all levels of the new proposals is that much of the sensible protection put in place by the PPG system in the 80s and 90s and carried forward by the NPPF system is to be weakened or scrapped.
Out of interest, what material have you been looking at? Where is the proposal to downgrade archaeology and environmental protections?
Consultation documents being circulated by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists amongst others.
In some ways it is already too late. The Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 already prevents local authorities from imposing pre-commencement conditions on planning applications without developer agreement. This basically means that the developer can refuse to have archaeological or environmental mitigations included in the planning permission and the only authority the council has is to refuse permission entirely. But the ability to refuse permission is also taken away from the council in many cases so the developer just has to hold out and they get permission anyway.
I'll be interested to see it.
In my view consultees need cutting down to size quite significantly - particularly perhaps archaeology and bats, and the default way in which reports can be required sometimes without justification because it is the "safe" option for the Planning Officer.
Given that the main consultees for archaeology are the statutory local authority appointed archaeologists I fail to see how you could cut it down any more without removing it completely.
Protecting archaeology - either in situ or by recording - matters. The reason the protections were brought into the planning system in the first place was because developers would happily carve their way through important archaeological sites and not bother to report or record them. The whole basis of the PPG system was 'the polluter pays'. Why do you object to that as a basic principle?
There are already terrible gaps in the system which have never been properly addressed. So for the last decade I have been consulting on and at times running the investigation of the most important Late Upper Palaeolithic site in western Europe. This is a site where you can literally see from the flint scatters the footprints where people sat 14,000 years ago and knapped flints. It has helped hugely with our understanding of the recolonisation of the British archipelago after the last Ice Age.
It is a site that is ripe for development as it is at a road junction on a major trunk road and actually one where development would be welcome for many reasons. The site, having no evidence of structure, cannot be protected by scheduling under UK planning law but it does need to be properly recorded before being destroyed. Sites like this were only discovered because there was a statutory responsibility for a DTA prior to planning permission being given.
Villiers: 'This by-election result should pave the way for a reduction in housing targets for the London suburbs and the south east. We need a fairer distribution of new homes across the country, rather than seeking to cram so many thousands more into the crowded south."
In principle I see her point. A problem is that so many jobs are in the south - you can build houses very cheaply on the Yorkshire Moors, but demand is limited, and the sort of places that most developers build in the south are too expensive for lower-income families. There is real demand for inexpensive homes for rent or sale in the north and indeed in the south, but private developers are notably uninterested in those. What's needed is a government initiative to make blocks of flats, especially for rent, an attractive proposition, either by direct finance, through councils or by incentives for private developers.
I see a random study is out saying c. 75% of Urban Indians have had Covid, and c. 55% of rural Indians.
Looks like the Delta varient will be far too trasnmissible for its own good and run out of road in just a few weeks per area it arrives.
Can you link to the study ?
That and the SHAPE of the indian cases covid curve on worldometers could potentially point to herd immunity being achieved there.
Worth noting the seropositivity rates there are no higher that we now have in the UK - further points to delta exit wave just being about filling in local pockets of weakness where vaccine take-up has been slack / kids.
Delta infection in Bolton, given detection and case rates has probably only moved seropositivity by 2-3% over the last month. Even there, jabs are likely filling in immunity much faster than infection.
It is grimly fascinating this arms race between vaccination and infection. I don't think it has ever been observed to anything like this detail and on such scale, even in the post war flu pandemics we simply didn't have the tools we have today.
As of today it seems a variant's best chance is outpacing rapid herd immunity by greater infectiousness, which has driven R0 very high in the case of Delta. I suspect, with current levels of human interaction and immunity that we are already past herd immunity for Alpha, leading to the very rapid switchover to Delta that has already completed according to PHE. Can this strategy go further, could we see an Epsilon strain with near measles level infectiousness - is that even possible for COVID? I think at this stage there is limited road left for this evolutionary approach by COVID in the UK.
Soon, an evolutionary favoured variant, Zeta, let's say, will have to resort to being sneaky, getting enough immune escape to keep bobbing along in a heavily immune population - sneakiness will trump raw infectiousness. It may appear to be mild, simply by operating in and amongst immunity that will continue to be refreshed by breastfeeding or by infection at young age, and it will disappear into the background as some manner of common cold. 'Appear' to be mild, note well - beware, poorly connected, open air living countries in Africa whose climate and lifestyles are not so conducive to spread; Delta and Epsilon are coming, beware those with links to heavily immune countries who are not vaccinating heavily themselves, Zeta could still be a kicker if it gets to Australasia. Where pandemic potential remains, there's a problem.
Until, one day, pandemic potential no longer remains in enough places and pff, COVID, as an issue at least, is gone.
Nicola Sturgeon announces she is making it illegal from Monday for Scots to travel to Manchester or Salford for "non-essential" reasons, citing high Covid rates in the English council areas. She says a similar ban for Bedford is being lifted....
.....Sturgeon asked by @DanVevers if ban on travel to Manchester/Salford is proportionate, given it has similar rates to (eg) Dundee.
"We have a legal obligation to act in a proportionate way.. we continue to take decisions on the basis of assessments of necessity & proportionality"
As it’s revealed UK food and drink exports to the EU have almost halved, No 10 says it’s only a temporary 15-year blip while we wait for the benefits of the Australian trade deal. https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1405861749895708679
Obviously there are a myriad of reasons why the Tory vote collapsed last night, and I'm sure planning laws and HS2 were significant. However, I suspect the Covid restrictions debate was not.
I also have a hypothesis that the Tories are losing some votes because of the cronyism, whiff of corruption, disregard for accountability, disregard for Parliamentary convention and the constitution, and propensity to tell straightforward lies that permeate this government. These matters are compounded by some of the more reactionary rhetoric - for example, the unseemly attacks on asylum seekers and their (illegal) treatment in the Dover barracks - that 'decent' Tories find beyond the pale. There's a certain type of educated, middle-class voter, who is Tory but not tribal Tory, who I suspect is pretty disgusted with the shenanigans of Boris and his mates. Heck, I even wonder if Theresa May could bring herself to vote for Boris's Tories in a secret ballot.
Hope you're right. Think you are.
That begs the question of why Boris swept England in 2019 in the first place. All this stuff was front and centre.
Boris's landslide was built on denigration of Corbyn, even while pinching his 2017 platform. It was built on Boris's powerful charisma, even while he ducked debates and interviews. Oh, and something about free microwaves and oven-ready Brexit.
- Immediate thought: great news! Shows Lib Dem potential in the south to challenge the Tory party that has shifted to being a personality-driven, big government, populist party under Johnson. Nice to see the Tories get a kicking in their natural territory, rather than being able to eat in to Labour territory in the north with no consequences
- Moreover, as a Lib Dem supporter, we needed some positive news story to make us heard and relevant after Brexit.
- However... while I can't claim to be an expert on the proposed planning reform, my overriding view is we need lots more houses in the south east and the London commuter belt. So I really hope we don't become the party nimbyism.
My personal thought of universally giving planning permission to build over any private golf courses with housing (if it is considered more profitable by the free market) didn't go down well in the focus group of my family, however.
Thankfully for the Tories, the solution is pretty straightforward. Replace Boris with almost anyone else and they would be much better placed in home-county-type fights.
Compare that with Labour's troubles, which currently feels like move left and lose votes, move right and lose votes.
Why would they give up all the red wall leave seats for a few southern Remain seats.
They should happily give up on a few urban London commuter seats for the much richer pickings in the Midlands and North.
In that respect Boris is a winner. Batley and Spen will be a tory gain.
I don't know about Batley & Spen. But, in general, the trade of Home Counties' and London Remain votes for gains in the North and Midlands works very much in the Conservatives' favour. The Conservatives need 335 seats for a working majority. It matters little where those 335 seats are located.
This is very true. But necessitates a completely different membership, funding stream, ideology and policies. Not a problem if you are just a Blue Team fan. But it is if you have any political beliefs.
The Conservative Party of 1935 was different to that of 1914; the party of 1960 was different to that of 1935; the party of 1985 was different to that of 1960; it's different again. The agenda moves on.
The past 11 years have been like the 1920's,. in terms of seats shifting allegiance. You gain votes at one end, and lose them at the other.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
As I suggested earlier: Jenrick gone in next reshuffle and some kind of 'review' of planning changes.
And yet the LDs were in Parliament yesterday calling for more immigration for low skilled low wage jobs. Because supporting that while opposing planning will do the housing market wonders. 🤦♂️
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I would suggest that the planning changes are not going to change very much. We don't know yet what they are but they look like procedural changes as to how land gets allocated for development through the local plan process, to try and speed it all up. Green Belt, AONB's etc will in all likelihood remain as they are and will in all reality probably be even more protected. The biggest problem as I see it is that they are trying to restructure the system too quickly, to try and get it all done in one parliament for political reasons.
The problem is that people who have plundered in to this, including Dominic Cummings, failed to see the difficulties. Cummings was sent to look at planning in his later days as an advisor, possibly they just wanted to direct his energy in to an intractable problem with no solutions so he exhausted himself.
Actually they are going to change a great deal and not for the better.
The changes are not primarily designed to make it easier to get planning permissions or get more houses built. That is another myth. What they do is sweep away the Thatcherite planning reforms of the 1980s and 90s which ensured that planning included environmental and other controls so that development is not as damaging as it once was.
So the PPG system that Thatcher created did not stop anyone building houses, nor did it make it easier for NIMBYs to prevent development. It ensured that when houses were built there was proper environmental and archaeological mitigation, proper investigation and preserving - either in situ or by recording - of historical features, alternative locations for sensitive environmental concerns. It also ensured there were proper transport and telecommunications links, that there was mitigation against noise, against pollution and against flooding and that there were the open spaces and amenities to make communities rather than dormitories. It basically made sure that the houses that were built were not created at an excessive cost to the existing environment in all its forms and that they were fit to live in (beyond just the basic structural elements) for those buying them.
Much of that has been swept away with the planning revisions. These are not aimed at making it easier to get permissions, they are aimed at making it cheaper for developers to build poorer houses with fewer controls and far more impact on the environment. We are building the slums of tomorrow.
Well. The planning bill hasn't yet been published, so you are ahead of the entire industry with this analysis.
Your comments just about make sense if they are a criticism of planning reform since 2012 (ie the NPPF and permitted development rights) which did replace the previous system of PPG's and PPS's. What really changed at this point though was the political removal of regional government and regional planning through which a lot of strategic large scale development was being driven.
It may not have been published in its final form but I have seen much of the consultation material and also had sight of the plans for specific areas such as the downgrading of archaeological protections (removing the need for pre-construction assessments, watching briefs and rescue archaeology) and environmental protections (removing the need for mitigations such as building alternative habitats and conducting impact studies).
The NPPF system was not as good as the old PPG system but it did retain much of the basic assumptions and practices - I know as I have operated under both systems. What is being said at all levels of the new proposals is that much of the sensible protection put in place by the PPG system in the 80s and 90s and carried forward by the NPPF system is to be weakened or scrapped.
Out of interest, what material have you been looking at? Where is the proposal to downgrade archaeology and environmental protections?
Consultation documents being circulated by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists amongst others.
In some ways it is already too late. The Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 already prevents local authorities from imposing pre-commencement conditions on planning applications without developer agreement. This basically means that the developer can refuse to have archaeological or environmental mitigations included in the planning permission and the only authority the council has is to refuse permission entirely. But the ability to refuse permission is also taken away from the council in many cases so the developer just has to hold out and they get permission anyway.
Nothing against the Chartered Institute of Archeologists and their take on the mood music surrounding planning reform, but for anyone seriously interested in this subject, I recommend reading the actual government proposals:
In laymans terms, the act cited by Richard Tyndall requires Council's to get the agreement of the developer before putting on a planning condition that prevents any work at all taking place until an the Council's Archeologist is happy. If this takes more than 3 years then the whole permission gets lost and the developer has to start again from scratch. It should only be done where there is a good reason to, not cut and pasted on to every decision; and the reforms seem to have achieved this aim by making Council's stop and think. Of course, if you are a commercial archaeologist then you aren't going to be happy about this as it reduces potential sources of work, but some sort of balance has to be struck between the interests of archaoelogy and the interests of development. Until relatively recently there was no requirement at all to carry out archaeological investigations of development sites.
Interesting observation on the "Brexit has led to increased tactical voting" meme:
In GEs the % voting tactically has been fairly stable around 10% in the BES. It gets talked about more, but I haven't yet seen convincing evidence that it's happening more. Obviously there's a ton of it in by-elections, but there always has been
Villiers: 'This by-election result should pave the way for a reduction in housing targets for the London suburbs and the south east. We need a fairer distribution of new homes across the country, rather than seeking to cram so many thousands more into the crowded south."
In principle I see her point. A problem is that so many jobs are in the south - you can build houses very cheaply on the Yorkshire Moors, but demand is limited, and the sort of places that most developers build in the south are too expensive for lower-income families. There is real demand for inexpensive homes for rent or sale in the north and indeed in the south, but private developers are notably uninterested in those. What's needed is a government initiative to make blocks of flats, especially for rent, an attractive proposition, either by direct finance, through councils or by incentives for private developers.
The trouble with flats is that by-and-large, people prefer not to live in them. In London many were built to be bought off-plan by foreign investors, or as BTL. Recently, cladding is another problem.
We need to return to 1950s-style new towns, where the government made sure the necessary infrastructure – roads, schools, dentists and so on – was in place, alongside more-or-less local jobs. Some jobs would arise organically, others might involved subsidies – think local development boards. These could be built in the north or other areas in need of economic development.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
Thankfully for the Tories, the solution is pretty straightforward. Replace Boris with almost anyone else and they would be much better placed in home-county-type fights.
Compare that with Labour's troubles, which currently feels like move left and lose votes, move right and lose votes.
Why would they give up all the red wall leave seats for a few southern Remain seats.
They should happily give up on a few urban London commuter seats for the much richer pickings in the Midlands and North.
In that respect Boris is a winner. Batley and Spen will be a tory gain.
I don't know about Batley & Spen. But, in general, the trade of Home Counties' and London Remain votes for gains in the North and Midlands works very much in the Conservatives' favour. The Conservatives need 335 seats for a working majority. It matters little where those 335 seats are located.
This is very true. But necessitates a completely different membership, funding stream, ideology and policies. Not a problem if you are just a Blue Team fan. But it is if you have any political beliefs.
No it doesn't. Tory policy constantly evolves, and there is nothing anti Tory about wanting a strong national middling sort aspirational base. Capitalism + state intervention is an ancient Tory ideology. Levelling up has been rightly borrowed from Labour who abandoned it in favour of their unpleasant mixture of elites patronising the poor while describing the centre right as 'scum' and 'vermin'.
What has changed is that until the GFC, big business, multinational companies, and right of centre parties marched in lockstep. Now they don't. Those voters who expect centre right parties to prioritise big business, multinational companies, and the economic interests of the upper middle classes are looking for a new home.
Interesting observation on the "Brexit has led to increased tactical voting" meme:
In GEs the % voting tactically has been fairly stable around 10% in the BES. It gets talked about more, but I haven't yet seen convincing evidence that it's happening more. Obviously there's a ton of it in by-elections, but there always has been
Though the recent study you linked to on voting in Scotland suggests that Brexit very much influences tactical voting here (along with indy of course):
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
Nicola Sturgeon announces she is making it illegal from Monday for Scots to travel to Manchester or Salford for "non-essential" reasons, citing high Covid rates in the English council areas. She says a similar ban for Bedford is being lifted....
.....Sturgeon asked by @DanVevers if ban on travel to Manchester/Salford is proportionate, given it has similar rates to (eg) Dundee.
"We have a legal obligation to act in a proportionate way.. we continue to take decisions on the basis of assessments of necessity & proportionality"
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
Total nonsense for the Sun to make Chesham & Amersham into some kind of repudiation of Starmer rather than Johnson.
Hartlepool, fair enough. Batley & Spen, if it's lost, ditto. But Labour and Green voters in Chesham & Amersham simply made what was very obviously the choice best calculated to harm the Conservative Party. Sometimes, things are as simple as they appear.
Boris's landslide was built on denigration of Corbyn
One of the Vote Leave strategists was quoted earlier saying he thinks they would have lost against any other leader
Bring on the Burgon!
I'd imagine CCHQ has already prepared its social media attack lines about Starmer, probably based on blaming him for every single high-profile crime committed while SKS was DPP.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket chain, has admitted grappling a shortage of drivers for its lorries as the haulage industry warns of a widespread UK delivery crisis aheadhttps://trib.al/LJkFVZn
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
I'm not joking, but Ursula von der Leyen's statement in response is: "This decision confirms the position of the Commission: AstraZeneca did not live up to the commitments it made in the contract. It is good to see that an independent judge confirms this."
The court judgment ordering AstraZeneca to deliver to us rapidly 50 million doses is good news for our vaccination campaign. It is also a clear recognition that our Advance Purchase Agreements have a sound legal basis.
I'm not joking, but Ursula von der Leyen's statement in response is: "This decision confirms the position of the Commission: AstraZeneca did not live up to the commitments it made in the contract. It is good to see that an independent judge confirms this."
I welcome today’s decision by the Belgian Court of First Instance ordering #AstraZeneca to urgently deliver 50 million doses to Flag of European Union, as follows: 15 million doses by 26 July, 20 million by 23 August, 15 million by 27 September.
The Court has also decided a penalty of €10 per missing dose.
This decision is based on the fact that #AstraZeneca has committed a serious breach of its contractual obligations with Flag of European Union, and contractual commitments should be followed.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
Lol, it wasn't about Labour, not this time.
I noted the other day that C&A could knock on into B&S. But I'm not convinced it favours Labour at all yet. the news cycle and perception of what it does to Boris's authority will be more important than the numbers.
And Boris could easily just pretend that last night never happened, or bluff it off as some kind of odd mishappenstance once more - I'm sure he had experience of such things - and he has a very good chance of getting away with it.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
Working class Northernerism.
Does your weekend of Blackpool debauchery start tonight? If so and your looking for a pubful of England supporters with whom to watch the match..
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
That fact alone disqualifies half the human race in the lunatic world of identity politics.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
Working class Northernerism.
Does your weekend of Blackpool debauchery start tonight? If so and your looking for a pubful of England supporters with whom to watch the match..
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
Total nonsense for the Sun to make Chesham & Amersham into some kind of repudiation of Starmer rather than Johnson.
Hartlepool, fair enough. Batley & Spen, if it's lost, ditto. But Labour and Green voters in Chesham & Amersham simply made what was very obviously the choice best calculated to harm the Conservative Party. Sometimes, things are as simple as they appear.
If the Lib Dems are threatening the Tories in their Home Counties heartlands it is actually great news for Labour. It means the Tories have to shore up their support in the South and so it diminishes their ability to lavish money and attention on the Red Wall. Fighting a war on two fronts is always challenging.
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
As I suggested earlier: Jenrick gone in next reshuffle and some kind of 'review' of planning changes.
And yet the LDs were in Parliament yesterday calling for more immigration for low skilled low wage jobs. Because supporting that while opposing planning will do the housing market wonders. 🤦♂️
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I would suggest that the planning changes are not going to change very much. We don't know yet what they are but they look like procedural changes as to how land gets allocated for development through the local plan process, to try and speed it all up. Green Belt, AONB's etc will in all likelihood remain as they are and will in all reality probably be even more protected. The biggest problem as I see it is that they are trying to restructure the system too quickly, to try and get it all done in one parliament for political reasons.
The problem is that people who have plundered in to this, including Dominic Cummings, failed to see the difficulties. Cummings was sent to look at planning in his later days as an advisor, possibly they just wanted to direct his energy in to an intractable problem with no solutions so he exhausted himself.
Actually they are going to change a great deal and not for the better.
The changes are not primarily designed to make it easier to get planning permissions or get more houses built. That is another myth. What they do is sweep away the Thatcherite planning reforms of the 1980s and 90s which ensured that planning included environmental and other controls so that development is not as damaging as it once was.
So the PPG system that Thatcher created did not stop anyone building houses, nor did it make it easier for NIMBYs to prevent development. It ensured that when houses were built there was proper environmental and archaeological mitigation, proper investigation and preserving - either in situ or by recording - of historical features, alternative locations for sensitive environmental concerns. It also ensured there were proper transport and telecommunications links, that there was mitigation against noise, against pollution and against flooding and that there were the open spaces and amenities to make communities rather than dormitories. It basically made sure that the houses that were built were not created at an excessive cost to the existing environment in all its forms and that they were fit to live in (beyond just the basic structural elements) for those buying them.
Much of that has been swept away with the planning revisions. These are not aimed at making it easier to get permissions, they are aimed at making it cheaper for developers to build poorer houses with fewer controls and far more impact on the environment. We are building the slums of tomorrow.
Well. The planning bill hasn't yet been published, so you are ahead of the entire industry with this analysis.
Your comments just about make sense if they are a criticism of planning reform since 2012 (ie the NPPF and permitted development rights) which did replace the previous system of PPG's and PPS's. What really changed at this point though was the political removal of regional government and regional planning through which a lot of strategic large scale development was being driven.
It may not have been published in its final form but I have seen much of the consultation material and also had sight of the plans for specific areas such as the downgrading of archaeological protections (removing the need for pre-construction assessments, watching briefs and rescue archaeology) and environmental protections (removing the need for mitigations such as building alternative habitats and conducting impact studies).
The NPPF system was not as good as the old PPG system but it did retain much of the basic assumptions and practices - I know as I have operated under both systems. What is being said at all levels of the new proposals is that much of the sensible protection put in place by the PPG system in the 80s and 90s and carried forward by the NPPF system is to be weakened or scrapped.
Out of interest, what material have you been looking at? Where is the proposal to downgrade archaeology and environmental protections?
Consultation documents being circulated by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists amongst others.
In some ways it is already too late. The Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 already prevents local authorities from imposing pre-commencement conditions on planning applications without developer agreement. This basically means that the developer can refuse to have archaeological or environmental mitigations included in the planning permission and the only authority the council has is to refuse permission entirely. But the ability to refuse permission is also taken away from the council in many cases so the developer just has to hold out and they get permission anyway.
Nothing against the Chartered Institute of Archeologists and their take on the mood music surrounding planning reform, but for anyone seriously interested in this subject, I recommend reading the actual government proposals:
In laymans terms, the act cited by Richard Tyndall requires Council's to get the agreement of the developer before putting on a planning condition that prevents any work at all taking place until an the Council's Archeologist is happy. If this takes more than 3 years then the whole permission gets lost and the developer has to start again from scratch. It should only be done where there is a good reason to, not cut and pasted on to every decision; and the reforms seem to have achieved this aim by making Council's stop and think. Of course, if you are a commercial archaeologist then you aren't going to be happy about this as it reduces potential sources of work, but some sort of balance has to be struck between the interests of archaoelogy and the interests of development. Until relatively recently there was no requirement at all to carry out archaeological investigations of development sites.
That is a ridiculous objection. The actual investigative work takes weeks not years and there are strict time limits set for getting consultations completed. Moreover the responsibility for getting the investigative work done lies with the developer themselves and they hire and fund the archaeologists doing the work. So if it takes more than three years (I would like to see an example where that has ever been the case) then that is because of a failure by the developer and their own consultants not by the planning legislation or the local council.
And 'relatively recently' was more than 30 years ago. Prior to that huge amounts of archaeology were lost - as we now now from investigation of adjacent or contiguous sites - because there was no requirement for investigation.
You are using straw man arguments.
Again none of these requirements stops development. According to the Government's own figures 0.01% of proposed developments are stopped by archaeological concerns and even in those cases they are then resubmitted with additional mitigations or exclusions.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
Knives out for Keir after the Chesham & Amersham by-election disaster. Hearing that supporters of Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy quietly ringing round to sound out possible support if he goes https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
What do either of them offer beyond being female...
I guess that the big three criticisms of Starmer are:
1. Not sufficiently politically astute to seize on opportunities and avoid elephant traps. 2. Cautious on policy both in terms of not churning it out and being bland. 3. Not able to convey personal warmth.
Those criticisms are harsh, but have elements of truth, certainly.
Both Nandy and Rayner could make a decent case on 3 - I know likeability is a very personal, subjective thing but they are fairly clearly less robotic. On 1, it's a bit shaky - where's their record of being shrewd operators? On 2, it's fairly hard to say whether they can offer red meat on policy in private discussions with colleagues.
- Immediate thought: great news! Shows Lib Dem potential in the south to challenge the Tory party that has shifted to being a personality-driven, big government, populist party under Johnson. Nice to see the Tories get a kicking in their natural territory, rather than being able to eat in to Labour territory in the north with no consequences
- Moreover, as a Lib Dem supporter, we needed some positive news story to make us heard and relevant after Brexit.
- However... while I can't claim to be an expert on the proposed planning reform, my overriding view is we need lots more houses in the south east and the London commuter belt. So I really hope we don't become the party nimbyism.
My personal thought of universally giving planning permission to build over any private golf courses with housing (if it is considered more profitable by the free market) didn't go down well in the focus group of my family, however.
It's an easy choice for the local campaigns unless the LDs are ever back in gov.
18th June 1812. Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo leads to peace in Europe and Abba’s first ever number one.
"My, my At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender"
No he didn't. He never surrendered. After the battle he returned to Paris hoping to raise another army. When he realised the legislature and people wouldn't support this, he abdicated in favour of his son.
Obviously there are a myriad of reasons why the Tory vote collapsed last night, and I'm sure planning laws and HS2 were significant. However, I suspect the Covid restrictions debate was not.
I also have a hypothesis that the Tories are losing some votes because of the cronyism, whiff of corruption, disregard for accountability, disregard for Parliamentary convention and the constitution, and propensity to tell straightforward lies that permeate this government. These matters are compounded by some of the more reactionary rhetoric - for example, the unseemly attacks on asylum seekers and their (illegal) treatment in the Dover barracks - that 'decent' Tories find beyond the pale. There's a certain type of educated, middle-class voter, who is Tory but not tribal Tory, who I suspect is pretty disgusted with the shenanigans of Boris and his mates. Heck, I even wonder if Theresa May could bring herself to vote for Boris's Tories in a secret ballot.
Hope you're right. Think you are.
That begs the question of why Boris swept England in 2019 in the first place. All this stuff was front and centre.
Boris's landslide was built on denigration of Corbyn, even while pinching his 2017 platform.
But he didn't steal Corbyn's 2017 platform. According to the BBC, the key points of Labour 2017 were:
Scrap student tuition fees Nationalisation of England's nine water companies. Re-introduce the 50p rate of tax on the highest earners (above £123,000) Income tax rate 45p on £80,000 and above More free childcare, expanding free provisions for two, three and four year olds Guarantee triple lock for pensioner incomes End to zero hours contracts Hire 10,000 new police officers, 3,000 new firefighters Moves to charge companies a levy on salaries above £330,000 Deliver rail electrification "including in Wales and the South West".
The Conservatives didn't adopt any of those, except hiring more police and rail electrification, which I think were both in their 2017 manifesto as well.
The various recent developments in fusion are quite encouraging, and I think there's a very real prospect that one of them will come to fruition before the massive state funded European effort.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
- Immediate thought: great news! Shows Lib Dem potential in the south to challenge the Tory party that has shifted to being a personality-driven, big government, populist party under Johnson. Nice to see the Tories get a kicking in their natural territory, rather than being able to eat in to Labour territory in the north with no consequences
- Moreover, as a Lib Dem supporter, we needed some positive news story to make us heard and relevant after Brexit.
- However... while I can't claim to be an expert on the proposed planning reform, my overriding view is we need lots more houses in the south east and the London commuter belt. So I really hope we don't become the party nimbyism.
My personal thought of universally giving planning permission to build over any private golf courses with housing (if it is considered more profitable by the free market) didn't go down well in the focus group of my family, however.
The planning system isn’t responsible for the shortage of new homes. The Tories simply scapegoat the planning system because local councils are an easy target and because they can’t go after the big property developers for reasons that will be left as an exercise for the reader.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
Been shopping in the West End.
The Tartan Army are here in big numbers and high spirits.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
The restrictions we face when going abroad depend on our infection rate not our hospitalisation or death rate, plus their calculus of their own vulnerability.
No big suggestion in their data that delta is at large in Italy last I looked, so this is probably a 'why didn't they do this sooner' event (cf. Boris and India).
Zoë COVID study shows rates slowing down for the last few days which is good news. The key is in these two graphs showing the power of even partial vaccination and the age effects - with signs that the youth epidemic is running out of steam.
Surely this is the terminal spasm of a dying culture. Apparently political discourse is now universally mediated by the visual metaphor of fake walls being breached by fat middle aged white men. We can only hope the cetacean civilisation that will follow our very welcome extinction will be better.
That mallet is so small. Bit cringey tbh
Looks like a really naff copycat of what Boris did with his wall already.
Go big or go home, is anyone impressed with a second-hand joke being done in a tiny manner?
It’s just a visual to maximise the news coverage, before the news agenda moves on, as it will very soon. That you noticed, is job done.
18th June 1812. Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo leads to peace in Europe and Abba’s first ever number one.
"My, my At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender"
No he didn't. He never surrendered. After the battle he returned to Paris hoping to raise another army. When he realised the legislature and people wouldn't support this, he abdicated in favour of his son.
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
As I suggested earlier: Jenrick gone in next reshuffle and some kind of 'review' of planning changes.
And yet the LDs were in Parliament yesterday calling for more immigration for low skilled low wage jobs. Because supporting that while opposing planning will do the housing market wonders. 🤦♂️
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I would suggest that the planning changes are not going to change very much. We don't know yet what they are but they look like procedural changes as to how land gets allocated for development through the local plan process, to try and speed it all up. Green Belt, AONB's etc will in all likelihood remain as they are and will in all reality probably be even more protected. The biggest problem as I see it is that they are trying to restructure the system too quickly, to try and get it all done in one parliament for political reasons.
The problem is that people who have plundered in to this, including Dominic Cummings, failed to see the difficulties. Cummings was sent to look at planning in his later days as an advisor, possibly they just wanted to direct his energy in to an intractable problem with no solutions so he exhausted himself.
Actually they are going to change a great deal and not for the better.
The changes are not primarily designed to make it easier to get planning permissions or get more houses built. That is another myth. What they do is sweep away the Thatcherite planning reforms of the 1980s and 90s which ensured that planning included environmental and other controls so that development is not as damaging as it once was.
So the PPG system that Thatcher created did not stop anyone building houses, nor did it make it easier for NIMBYs to prevent development. It ensured that when houses were built there was proper environmental and archaeological mitigation, proper investigation and preserving - either in situ or by recording - of historical features, alternative locations for sensitive environmental concerns. It also ensured there were proper transport and telecommunications links, that there was mitigation against noise, against pollution and against flooding and that there were the open spaces and amenities to make communities rather than dormitories. It basically made sure that the houses that were built were not created at an excessive cost to the existing environment in all its forms and that they were fit to live in (beyond just the basic structural elements) for those buying them.
Much of that has been swept away with the planning revisions. These are not aimed at making it easier to get permissions, they are aimed at making it cheaper for developers to build poorer houses with fewer controls and far more impact on the environment. We are building the slums of tomorrow.
Which would be great if the system had worked, but it hasn't. Our population has grown by over ten million in a generation and the housing market didn't keep up with that.
As for "slums" its ironic that I see some people here complaining that developers are only building small, boxy "slums", while others here complain that developers are only building large expensive homes that can't be afforded (while ignoring the fact that people who buy a large home, sell their smaller one they move out of).
As Thatcher showed herself, the more there is a free market, the more competition there is, the more standards need to rise. Those who build slums will find their slums unsellable if they can be competed against by people building good homes.
The point being that the planning system has had bugger all to do with the failure to build more houses. Yes the population has grown but the failure to build houses to accommodate them has been due to strategic failures by government combined with a developer controlled system that allows them to land bank to maintain and increase the value of their assets. Given the ability of local councils to approve huge numbers of new houses in secret during that same period it can hardly be claimed that the planning system was preventing developments going ahead.
All the planning reforms do is remove the responsibility of developers to act in a manner we would all expect and should demand. And those large expensive homes are the very future slums I am talking about. They are poorly built with no amenities and no regard for existing local facilities. You are defending the indefensible and I assume this is due to complete ignorance of the subject.
I have long thought that the failure of planning policy is related to one principle obsession of the British middle class: house prices. Successive governments are terrified of doing what is necessary because if they overheat supply there will be a resultant collapse in the house price bubble, leading to negative equity and very pissed off voters. Therefore better to have high demand and low supply so the bubble remains inflated. Young people therefore get stuffed unless the Bank of Mum and Dad coughs up.
I had that down on my super short list of TBOBS* - a property crash. Ideally you'd want stagnant prices over many years to get a gradual, pain free adjustment, but sadly markets don't work that way. It's up and up until it pops.
* tangible benefits of brexit
Not a terribly nice wish. Property crashes of the past have lead to debt, repossessions, family breakdown and suicide. What else is on your shortlist? A pandemic that reduces the surplus population?
That was number 2. Number 1 is more 100% benign - a collapse of the City of London financial sector. But wait! - to be followed by a new, unbloated, real value-added version.
Ah, ok, I guess that will also have the benefit of most people's pension schemes collapsing, R&D funding on medical and environmental products drying up and insufficient corporation tax to fund the NHS et al. We could call it a "levelling down" agenda, or the Venezuela Project. Interesting Utopia.
You are Jeremy Corbyn and I claim my £5 !
Well I am a fullish fat leftist, Nigel. You and me are strangely sympatico at times but there's some clear blue water there too. Look, can you see me on the other bank? I'm waving.
ONS infection survey data doesn't look particularly alarming. Don't see how that series which measures all infections will hit anything like the Warwick predictions that were used to justify the lockdown extension.
It will be interesting to see how PCR positives trend over the next 10 days. I think we will be seeing the specimen date trend going down by then but the LFT rate steady or increasing as more people report asymptomatic infections and fewer report symptomatic COVID.
It will be very difficult to justify continued measures if PCR positives are trending downwards, but I'm sure the scientists will try and use LFTs to keep their restrictions going. I enjoyed Professor Pollard saying it was time to call and end to LFTs in schools, I think it's the right policy now that everyone is eligible to be vaccinated and by the start of the next school year all adults will have been called for both doses.
And in a beautiful moment for @CarlottaVance the England infection estimate is 1 in 520 whilst the Scotland figures is 1 in 600.
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
You sure about that?
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
Comments
Go big or go home, is anyone impressed with a second-hand joke being done in a tiny manner?
I've observed the rise and fall of many regimes over the years from a detached and objective perspective. I always love it when the diehards claim there's nothing to worry about.
Peak Boris passed on May 25th. It's all downhill now. Many people will enjoy the slide.
'.......A future tory voter, there......'
I think I’m far too woke to vote Tory
Its amazing, Mr G. how attitudes change when you become a property owner!
Deserving welfare cases become scrounging layabouts overnight. You becomes strangely attracted to the headlines in the Daily Telegraph. And yes maybe you ARE paying a lot of tax!
None of those things happened to me when I became a property owner, even when I'd paid off my mortgage.
Also back then we had an opposition that bothered to oppose.
Most planning officers would prefer not to spend half their live chasing up reports that are required but aren't someone else's priority. The simple fact is they need to turn things round in 8 weeks so it makes sense to get as much as possible provided as early as possible.
My local council, not one of the quickest, got to a draft plan by 2018; it's really unforgivable for a planning authority not to get at least that far.
Richard Tyndall has it right on this - the Local Plan will be no more than a facade in the proposed new system, it hands nearly all the (remaining) power to the developers.
It has been 40+ years since it has been regarded as anything other than anathema and evil poison.
You may be comfortable with it, but the entire membership, voters and funders aren't aware they've always been at war with East Asia.
So there will be significant churn.
Somewhat ominous… https://twitter.com/cop26/status/1405515119119896587
https://twitter.com/Charlie_cat000/status/1405513064527679491
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/18/chesham-amersham-by-election-lifelong-tories-reveal-real-reason/
I think they're overdoing it but there's no doubt about the fury over HS2.
By the way, the Telegraph are doing a 3 months for £1 trial at the moment. Some of the journalism is excellent once you filter out the nasty stuff.
Thus disguising the effect of Brexit, and the character of the PM and government on the result.
As I say, I haven't read all the stuff on the Planning Reforms. So all comment on that is interesting.
On Local Plans (I did much wrestling with our local SHLAA back in 2007-2012) and so on - istm that the tough nut for the Govt to resolve is to create a way of making local councils take responsibility for the housing required, and deciding where it should be built - whilst closing off the possibility for Councils to simply slope shoulders on the unpopular bits and blame someone else such as the Govt.
It can't all be left up to Local Council as then NIMBYs will dominate. To me there is too much emphasis on people buying new houses paying for things that fit better into the local Council Tax.
Local Plans have been a thing for a long time - the first one I am familiar with for my Council was around 2002 (and that was a Review of an earlier one), but I would need to read back to find out when they came in in law.
I think there are plenty of things that can be changed to mitigate the need for housebuilding - encouraging more density of occupation for example.
Protecting archaeology - either in situ or by recording - matters. The reason the protections were brought into the planning system in the first place was because developers would happily carve their way through important archaeological sites and not bother to report or record them. The whole basis of the PPG system was 'the polluter pays'. Why do you object to that as a basic principle?
There are already terrible gaps in the system which have never been properly addressed. So for the last decade I have been consulting on and at times running the investigation of the most important Late Upper Palaeolithic site in western Europe. This is a site where you can literally see from the flint scatters the footprints where people sat 14,000 years ago and knapped flints. It has helped hugely with our understanding of the recolonisation of the British archipelago after the last Ice Age.
It is a site that is ripe for development as it is at a road junction on a major trunk road and actually one where development would be welcome for many reasons. The site, having no evidence of structure, cannot be protected by scheduling under UK planning law but it does need to be properly recorded before being destroyed. Sites like this were only discovered because there was a statutory responsibility for a DTA prior to planning permission being given.
It is grimly fascinating this arms race between vaccination and infection. I don't think it has ever been observed to anything like this detail and on such scale, even in the post war flu pandemics we simply didn't have the tools we have today.
As of today it seems a variant's best chance is outpacing rapid herd immunity by greater infectiousness, which has driven R0 very high in the case of Delta. I suspect, with current levels of human interaction and immunity that we are already past herd immunity for Alpha, leading to the very rapid switchover to Delta that has already completed according to PHE. Can this strategy go further, could we see an Epsilon strain with near measles level infectiousness - is that even possible for COVID? I think at this stage there is limited road left for this evolutionary approach by COVID in the UK.
Soon, an evolutionary favoured variant, Zeta, let's say, will have to resort to being sneaky, getting enough immune escape to keep bobbing along in a heavily immune population - sneakiness will trump raw infectiousness. It may appear to be mild, simply by operating in and amongst immunity that will continue to be refreshed by breastfeeding or by infection at young age, and it will disappear into the background as some manner of common cold. 'Appear' to be mild, note well - beware, poorly connected, open air living countries in Africa whose climate and lifestyles are not so conducive to spread; Delta and Epsilon are coming, beware those with links to heavily immune countries who are not vaccinating heavily themselves, Zeta could still be a kicker if it gets to Australasia. Where pandemic potential remains, there's a problem.
Until, one day, pandemic potential no longer remains in enough places and pff, COVID, as an issue at least, is gone.
WFH could completely change that dynamic, except the Government seem intent on demanding the return of the commute
.....Sturgeon asked by @DanVevers if ban on travel to Manchester/Salford is proportionate, given it has similar rates to (eg) Dundee.
"We have a legal obligation to act in a proportionate way.. we continue to take decisions on the basis of assessments of necessity & proportionality"
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1405850290142724106?s=20
https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1405861749895708679
- Immediate thought: great news! Shows Lib Dem potential in the south to challenge the Tory party that has shifted to being a personality-driven, big government, populist party under Johnson. Nice to see the Tories get a kicking in their natural territory, rather than being able to eat in to Labour territory in the north with no consequences
- Moreover, as a Lib Dem supporter, we needed some positive news story to make us heard and relevant after Brexit.
- However... while I can't claim to be an expert on the proposed planning reform, my overriding view is we need lots more houses in the south east and the London commuter belt. So I really hope we don't become the party nimbyism.
My personal thought of universally giving planning permission to build over any private golf courses with housing (if it is considered more profitable by the free market) didn't go down well in the focus group of my family, however.
The past 11 years have been like the 1920's,. in terms of seats shifting allegiance. You gain votes at one end, and lose them at the other.
Brussels court finds in favour of #AstraZeneca in case taken by the European Commission - response from #AZ
https://twitter.com/ShonaMurray_/status/1405860369592111111?s=20
So yes, Nicola should have advised the Tartan army not to travel for their own safety.
https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1405864465975988227
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/958420/MHCLG-Planning-Consultation.pdf
In laymans terms, the act cited by Richard Tyndall requires Council's to get the agreement of the developer before putting on a planning condition that prevents any work at all taking place until an the Council's Archeologist is happy. If this takes more than 3 years then the whole permission gets lost and the developer has to start again from scratch. It should only be done where there is a good reason to, not cut and pasted on to every decision; and the reforms seem to have achieved this aim by making Council's stop and think. Of course, if you are a commercial archaeologist then you aren't going to be happy about this as it reduces potential sources of work, but some sort of balance has to be struck between the interests of archaoelogy and the interests of development. Until relatively recently there was no requirement at all to carry out archaeological investigations of development sites.
In GEs the % voting tactically has been fairly stable around 10% in the BES. It gets talked about more, but I haven't yet seen convincing evidence that it's happening more. Obviously there's a ton of it in by-elections, but there always has been
https://twitter.com/MattSingh_/status/1405843273957134341?s=20
He was 3.25, roughly equal with Verstappen and Bottas, ahead of time.
We need to return to 1950s-style new towns, where the government made sure the necessary infrastructure – roads, schools, dentists and so on – was in place, alongside more-or-less local jobs. Some jobs would arise organically, others might involved subsidies – think local development boards. These could be built in the north or other areas in need of economic development.
In Scotland, the trend in the percentage of people testing positive remains uncertain in the week ending 12 June 2021; we estimate that 8,800 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,900 to 14,000) equating to around 1 in 600 people.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/18june2021
The upper estimate in Scotland is 1 in 380, England 1 in 440.
"We see him more as a 'gaffe artisan', crafting each one by hand." https://twitter.com/ChrisMasonBBC/status/1405866859572891652
https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/1405867172518236160
Hartlepool, fair enough. Batley & Spen, if it's lost, ditto. But Labour and Green voters in Chesham & Amersham simply made what was very obviously the choice best calculated to harm the Conservative Party. Sometimes, things are as simple as they appear.
Pathetic attention seeking court case.
Good results for Europe!
The court judgment ordering AstraZeneca to deliver to us rapidly 50 million doses is good news for our vaccination campaign. It is also a clear recognition that our Advance Purchase Agreements have a sound legal basis.
Our vaccines strategy delivers.
https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1405865928882102273?s=20
The EU had demanded 300 million by the end of September.
The court said 80 million - of which 70 have already been delivered......
https://twitter.com/SKyriakidesEU/status/1405865733498851334
The timely delivery of #COVID19 vaccines is crucial.
I welcome today’s decision by the Belgian Court of First Instance ordering #AstraZeneca to urgently deliver 50 million doses to Flag of European Union, as follows: 15 million doses by 26 July, 20 million by 23 August, 15 million by 27 September.
The Court has also decided a penalty of €10 per missing dose.
This decision is based on the fact that #AstraZeneca has committed a serious breach of its contractual obligations with Flag of European Union, and contractual commitments should be followed.
You had such a great anti-Nippy point scoring talking point. I feel for you to have it so cruelly yanked away.
I noted the other day that C&A could knock on into B&S. But I'm not convinced it favours Labour at all yet. the news cycle and perception of what it does to Boris's authority will be more important than the numbers.
And Boris could easily just pretend that last night never happened, or bluff it off as some kind of odd mishappenstance once more - I'm sure he had experience of such things - and he has a very good chance of getting away with it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/18/beware-boris-start-southern-revolt-against-high-tax-eco-extreme/
https://tinyurl.com/zkt9w5er
I made the decision to be at home for the England v. Scotland match.
Travellers entering the country from the UK must self-isolate for five days upon arrival.
Meanwhile, travel restrictions are being relaxed for visitors from the US, Canada, Japan and other EU member states.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/italy-covid-quarantine-uk-travel-b1868520.html
And 'relatively recently' was more than 30 years ago. Prior to that huge amounts of archaeology were lost - as we now now from investigation of adjacent or contiguous sites - because there was no requirement for investigation.
You are using straw man arguments.
Again none of these requirements stops development. According to the Government's own figures 0.01% of proposed developments are stopped by archaeological concerns and even in those cases they are then resubmitted with additional mitigations or exclusions.
At work we have a new format for our email signatures....
....which includes pronouns (optional).
After a quick check down below, I opted for 'he/him'.
Actually, a name like Sandy* is ambiguous, so pronouns are helpful to the recipient.
*I'm not really called Sandy
Huzzah for the Seventh Coalition.
1. Not sufficiently politically astute to seize on opportunities and avoid elephant traps.
2. Cautious on policy both in terms of not churning it out and being bland.
3. Not able to convey personal warmth.
Those criticisms are harsh, but have elements of truth, certainly.
Both Nandy and Rayner could make a decent case on 3 - I know likeability is a very personal, subjective thing but they are fairly clearly less robotic. On 1, it's a bit shaky - where's their record of being shrewd operators? On 2, it's fairly hard to say whether they can offer red meat on policy in private discussions with colleagues.
"My, my
At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender"
No he didn't. He never surrendered. After the battle he returned to Paris hoping to raise another army. When he realised the legislature and people wouldn't support this, he abdicated in favour of his son.
Do better, ABBA.
https://twitter.com/arrroberts/status/1403334780608040962
Scrap student tuition fees
Nationalisation of England's nine water companies.
Re-introduce the 50p rate of tax on the highest earners (above £123,000)
Income tax rate 45p on £80,000 and above
More free childcare, expanding free provisions for two, three and four year olds
Guarantee triple lock for pensioner incomes
End to zero hours contracts
Hire 10,000 new police officers, 3,000 new firefighters
Moves to charge companies a levy on salaries above £330,000
Deliver rail electrification "including in Wales and the South West".
The Conservatives didn't adopt any of those, except hiring more police and rail electrification, which I think were both in their 2017 manifesto as well.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57512229
The various recent developments in fusion are quite encouraging, and I think there's a very real prospect that one of them will come to fruition before the massive state funded European effort.
First Light Fusion have just started their first test shot program.
https://firstlightfusion.com/media-archive/uk-science-minister-amanda-solloway-mp-launch-first-light-fusions-maiden-big-gun-fusion-campaign/
I said it at the time, you'd much rather have a contractual obligation than a moral obligation.
The final sentence confirms it.
Hmm. I think Napoleon was still a thousand miles to the East on that date.
The planning system isn’t responsible for the shortage of new homes. The Tories simply scapegoat the planning system because local councils are an easy target and because they can’t go after the big property developers for reasons that will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Worst performance ever in a by election since the Labour Party came into existence.
The leader has to go.
The Tartan Army are here in big numbers and high spirits.
Life goes on.
https://order-order.com/2021/06/18/carole-cadwalladr-on-fifth-law-firm-in-arron-banks-defamation-case/
The restrictions we face when going abroad depend on our infection rate not our hospitalisation or death rate, plus their calculus of their own vulnerability.
No big suggestion in their data that delta is at large in Italy last I looked, so this is probably a 'why didn't they do this sooner' event (cf. Boris and India).
https://twitter.com/timspector/status/1405858264999501827?s=20