What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere and claimed on expenses, and have no understanding of those on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Is it just me who finds it really weird to see Tory politicians wading in and sparking these arguments? If ever there was an example of government overreach when the market should be able to decide I think politicians opining on whether people should be penalised for WFH is a pretty classic example. Why do Tories, especially, care what private businesses do?
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of railway costs are fixed. Perhaps some savings can be made in terms of train crew and rolling stock costs, but the infrastructure still needs maintaining and that pretty much stays the same however many trains you run.
Another thing is that you can't actual cut anything if you need X trains running between 7 and 9 AM and again between 5 to 7pm.
You end up needing the other services running to have the drivers and trains in the right place.
While the ratio of hospitalisation and death to cases is of course very much diminished, I think it is going too far to say that case numbers no longer matter.
They still give an advanced warning of what is heading towards the hospitals, and ultimately if case numbers go through the roof the NHS will still be buggered.
I'm not one of those saying that we need to tighten restrictions now, but the models must indicate a case rate trigger point when action is needed. Hopefully we never reach that point.
But the point is that we've vaccinated as many people as possible, we've got booster doses coming. If that's not enough for a completely open society then what are we going to do? Constant lockdowns? Christmas cancelled forever? Everyone locked up from November to February? I don't understand this mentality of even thinking about any restrictions post-vaccine. Either they are enough or they aren't. If they aren't then we need a completely different answer to lockdowns because we'll be doing it forever.
I don’t believe that reintroducing restrictions is equitable. Young people are more risk taking than oldies generally. If they want to take the risk of catching Covid in a crowded bar or nightclub, or want to take the risk of staying unvaccinated, it’s now time to allow them to do so. As a double vaccinated oldie, I plan to minimise my own risk by avoiding places where young people gather, or crowded places generally.
I see we are back to anecdotal stories about I know somebody who got it despite been jabbed etc etc etc.
Not to downplay that unfortunately people will get it, some will get it bad, but we don't do this for any other disease. We all know somebody who got cancer, had a terrible heart attack etc etc etc, with doctors saying they had a lucky escape there, and we don't then run into the fall out shelter.
Humans are terrible at assessing risk and fixate on the horror stories e.g. why people are shit scared of shark attacks, despite you having basically no risk of actually suffering on, in comparison to getting in their car every day (and many being very naughty and driving at speed).
What we need to see is the latest data on how the vaccines are holding up. The last time it all looked bang in line with the initial PHE estimates with well into the 90% reduction in hospitalization, and nothing like the initial scare data from Israel. The US is also looking good at the moment in terms of among the vaccinated.
Don't be patronising. You personally may be shit at assessing risk, and thanks for sharing. I am pretty bloody good at it.
You are obviously a massive outlier...or perhaps not.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere and claimed on expenses, and have no understanding of those on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Is it just me who finds it really weird to see Tory politicians wading in and sparking these arguments? If ever there was an example of government overreach when the market should be able to decide I think politicians opining on whether people should be penalised for WFH is a pretty classic example. Why do Tories, especially, care what private businesses do?
Yes, it’s wierd.
What they’re looking at is the raw GDP data, where every pound spent on the season ticket, the Starbucks and the Pret is a positive.
What they’re missing, is that for most people, these expenditures are seen as massive negatives.
Mean, why not tell us what Mr J scored in Scotland? Or Wales and NI?
As the Tories only have 6 seats in Scotland, 0 in NI and Labour still have most seats in Wales.
Labour will only get in by winning Tory seats in England, the SNP will prop up Labour anyway
I talk about salmon and you talk about the same old herring you do every day.
You are always telling us how much the Scots love Mr J. I was looking forward to seeing verification.
Scots' opinion on Boris is irrelevant.
He is UK PM not Scottish PM and as long as he remains PM he can also refuse a legal indyref2.
Scots' opinion on Starmer might be relevant as he will need Scottish MPs support to become PM, Boris however was elected UK PM with an 80 seat majority despite losing in Scotland
That's an, erm, interesting proposal. That excludes even Unionists for the crime of being Scottish.
It is deaths and hospitalisations that matter and they are far below where they were six months ago.
We will never eliminate Covid cases, we just have to live with it, though the double vaccinated tend to be less prone to catch it as well as being far less likely to be hospitalised
Cases are never, ever, irrelevant. Because hospitalisations and deaths are a positive function of the number of cases. How positive is the real issue.
While the ratio of hospitalisation and death to cases is of course very much diminished, I think it is going too far to say that case numbers no longer matter.
They still give an advanced warning of what is heading towards the hospitals, and ultimately if case numbers go through the roof the NHS will still be buggered.
I'm not one of those saying that we need to tighten restrictions now, but the models must indicate a case rate trigger point when action is needed. Hopefully we never reach that point.
But the point is that we've vaccinated as many people as possible, we've got booster doses coming. If that's not enough for a completely open society then what are we going to do? Constant lockdowns? Christmas cancelled forever? Everyone locked up from November to February? I don't understand this mentality of even thinking about any restrictions post-vaccine. Either they are enough or they aren't. If they aren't then we need a completely different answer to lockdowns because we'll be doing it forever.
We think that vaccination is enough, and so far we are holding the line. However, if the virus runs through the population at a rate of knots, then some action to "flatten the sombrero" may be required.
If this is a continuation of WFH, masks on trains and in Tesco or closing nightclubs again then so be it.
Having patients die because they couldn't access the critical care they need is a scenario we need to avoid.
We've just had 1.6m confirmed cases in this wave and it's still going, we're at about 13% of peak in-hospital than we had in the previous wave with cases that previously resulted in around 30k people needing hospital care. The latest data we have is that only around 15% of in-hospital cases are from double-vaxxed people, out of about 5k.
I don't think the door to restrictions should ever be opened again. We need to live with this otherwise we're going to be on and off lockdown for years and all because some selfish idiots decided they were too good for the vaccine. No thanks.
So if the population was 100% vaccinated we'd expect the number of people in hospital with Covid to be 800? Even with a relatively high recent case rate?
That's astounding. I don't want to coerce anyone to have the vaccine, but I think we ought to be pushing every button we can think of to encourage the vaccination rate up. It will make a big difference to the demand placed on the NHS this winter, which will be important in terms of keeping up with elective surgery.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of railway costs are fixed. Perhaps some savings can be made in terms of train crew and rolling stock costs, but the infrastructure still needs maintaining and that pretty much stays the same however many trains you run.
But a massive amount of that infrastructure, is only required for a few hours a day. If there’s no longer 2m people looking to get to a desk half a mile from Bank at 8am and not a minute later, the whole system becomes much easier to manage.
Sister shows 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙇𝙪𝙣𝙘𝙝𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 with @GloriaDePiero and 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙋𝙈 with @DarrenGBNews will also air at 1200 and 1530 - coming soon!Party popper
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
FPT - I don't want to comment too much on individual posters but on Alistair I think his issue was with the way the Brexit vote was won, not its case in principle.
Anyone who disagreed then had the Curse of Cain upon them, as far as he was concerned, and he would deliberately provoke, and then it could get personal. That never changed even after nearly 5 years.
Throughout (and still today) I have perfectly civil discussions with him on betting opportunities, so I now confine my discussions with him to those alone.
You're right, I think, that his bugbear was with how Leave won rather than the fact of Leave winning.
I kind of feel this too. Brexit itself doesn't bother me that much. I have no great concern for the economy outside the EU, it'll chug on, and life in England is hardly going to plunge into the cultural dark ages.
So why was it like a mule had kicked me in the stomach on 24th June 2016? It was because I just felt that the less elevated side of our nation had prevailed.
And I must stress here - and I really do stress this - that by this I do NOT mean that all the individuals who voted Remain are cut from better cloth than all of those who voted Leave. I don't mean that at all.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere and claimed on expenses, and have no understanding of those on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Is it just me who finds it really weird to see Tory politicians wading in and sparking these arguments? If ever there was an example of government overreach when the market should be able to decide I think politicians opining on whether people should be penalised for WFH is a pretty classic example. Why do Tories, especially, care what private businesses do?
Yes, it’s wierd.
What they’re looking at is the raw GDP data, where every pound spent on the season ticket, the Starbucks and the Pret is a positive.
What they’re missing, is that for most people, these expenditures are seen as massive negatives.
That's a good illustration of the limitations of GDP as a descriptor of economic well-being.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
To be honest, railways in London would probably run better and more viably with more WFH; at the moment they have to provide huge amounts of expensive capacity for the peak hours which are then underused the rest of the day.
There's something odd with the repeated government shouting at people to get back to the office. I can't imagine many people (employees or bosses) thinking "you know, we were just fine with WFH or hybrid working, but those comments from Mr Sunak in the newspaper have put me right and no mistake. It's back on with the old pinstripe tomorrow morning."
Maybe you shouldn't have the work experience kid running the country.
Indeed, the Tube would run better with probably 85% of its capacity
I see we are back to anecdotal stories about I know somebody who got it despite been jabbed etc etc etc.
Not to downplay that unfortunately people will get it, some will get it bad, but we don't do this for any other disease. We all know somebody who got cancer, had a terrible heart attack etc etc etc, with doctors saying they had a lucky escape there, and we don't then run into the fall out shelter.
Humans are terrible at assessing risk and fixate on the horror stories e.g. why people are shit scared of shark attacks, despite you having basically no risk of actually suffering on, in comparison to getting in their car every day (and many being very naughty and driving at speed).
What we need to see is the latest data on how the vaccines are holding up. The last time it all looked bang in line with the initial PHE estimates with well into the 90% reduction in hospitalization, and nothing like the initial scare data from Israel. The US is also looking good at the moment in terms of among the vaccinated.
Don't be patronising. You personally may be shit at assessing risk, and thanks for sharing. I am pretty bloody good at it.
You are obviously a massive outlier...or perhaps not.
Its not really up for debate, the science is fairly settled on the matter.
Humans are shit at rational assessment of multi-factoral risk or risk in conditions of uncertainty. They are pretty good at the quick and dirty stuff (emotional, subconscious, rapid reaction), although we evolved that response for a different environment than we live in today.
Sister shows 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙇𝙪𝙣𝙘𝙝𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 with @GloriaDePiero and 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙋𝙈 with @DarrenGBNews will also air at 1200 and 1530 - coming soon!Party popper
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere and claimed on expenses, and have no understanding of those on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Is it just me who finds it really weird to see Tory politicians wading in and sparking these arguments? If ever there was an example of government overreach when the market should be able to decide I think politicians opining on whether people should be penalised for WFH is a pretty classic example. Why do Tories, especially, care what private businesses do?
Although Conservatives do claim to be in favour of the markets they do have a tendency to interfere in the markets where they really shouldn't. Sometimes yes they should, but in many cases they really shouldn't and they don't seem to notice they are doing the opposite to what they preach often.
It is interesting as I have had this discussion with @Philip_Thompson and @HYUFD in the past on this. Like a few other things they tend to have opposing views on the level of interference in the market by Govts.
When we decide that railways can't and won't make money we can get away from this pointless debate about privatisation vs nationalisation and we can have a proper debate about we ensure railways function to get people from A to B. These are only going to be more important debates as we phase out petrol and diesel.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The reason London Underground needed to run a full service is that when they ran partial services there was complaints about over crowding.
And I need to find the links but usage of public transport is related to the frequency of the service. The less frequent the service the less popular it is. Knock a service down by 25% and usage may well drop 30% or more.
So we get to cut funding to trains by 25% and overcrowding will drop by a further 5% or more on top of that? Win, win.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principles apply.)
Fake Para that helped bust into a BBC building they vacated years ago during a protest against a lockdown that's over certainly resonates with me, though maybe not in the way intended.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
On a slight tangent, I also find railways a weird market. I don't have a strong ideological view on it, I just don't understand why companies keep entering it. For all the hate they get and accusations of robber barons, profit margins are like 3%. When the East Coast Mainline franchise went bust the most recent time they forfeited a 'Performance Bond' to the government which was larger than their total profits since the franchise had started.
Why does anyone bother? I feel the same way about airlines, which are famously capital-intensive and risky. But at least they are glamorous.
I've not followed this in detail, but a cursory look at some of the allegations makes me think that he's got something of a point. In the same way that we kind of recognise that we should see George Washington having slaves in the historical context, and judge him on whether he treated them well and freed them, we should perhaps acknowledge that it was far more socially accepted a generation ago to give some of the hugs and pats and make some of the flirty comments than any sensible politician would consider today. He's clearly not moved with the times and is therefore a silly old man. There is however still a world of difference from people who talk about grabbing women's genitals or who have a record of actual sexual exploitation.
Should he resign? I dunno. But he's not a Donald Trump or Roman Polanski, and we do an injustice to victims of very serious abuse if we blur all such cases together.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of railway costs are fixed. Perhaps some savings can be made in terms of train crew and rolling stock costs, but the infrastructure still needs maintaining and that pretty much stays the same however many trains you run.
But a massive amount of that infrastructure, is only required for a few hours a day. If there’s no longer 2m people looking to get to a desk half a mile from Bank at 8am and not a minute later, the whole system becomes much easier to manage.
Absolutely. Without rush hour the railway would need less rolling stock, and what they did have would have higher utilisation. Trains that do one morning turn and one evening turn are bleeding money.
Fake Para that helped bust into a BBC building they vacated years ago during a protest against a lockdown that's over certainly resonates with me, though maybe not in the way intended.
"It saddens me to say that there were Para veterans and possibly serving Army personnel involved in this. At least 2 have been reported to the police and all others will be rooted out like a cancer."
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere and claimed on expenses, and have no understanding of those on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Is it just me who finds it really weird to see Tory politicians wading in and sparking these arguments? If ever there was an example of government overreach when the market should be able to decide I think politicians opining on whether people should be penalised for WFH is a pretty classic example. Why do Tories, especially, care what private businesses do?
Yes, it’s wierd.
What they’re looking at is the raw GDP data, where every pound spent on the season ticket, the Starbucks and the Pret is a positive.
What they’re missing, is that for most people, these expenditures are seen as massive negatives.
That's a good illustration of the limitations of GDP as a descriptor of economic well-being.
Oh indeed. Not just GDP, but VAT and business rates revenues too.
WFH costs the Treasury billions, that companies and individuals are saving.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The reason London Underground needed to run a full service is that when they ran partial services there was complaints about over crowding.
And I need to find the links but usage of public transport is related to the frequency of the service. The less frequent the service the less popular it is. Knock a service down by 25% and usage may well drop 30% or more.
So we get to cut funding to trains by 25% and overcrowding will drop by a further 5% or more on top of that? Win, win.
(This post is only partially tongue in cheek)
It's interesting that we often view public transport as something which must directly pay for itself, when roads and pavements are seen as investments to boost the economy and pay for itself only indirectly.
There will never be a Beeching Report for getting rid of vast numbers of small residential roads since the fuel duty/VED paid by drivers on the roads is less than the maintenance costs. And nor should there be, road links are part of general infrastructure as well as being a public service people have a right to. But I do find it a tad painful we don't tend to see bus or tube services the same way. TfL clearly boosts London's economy vastly beyond its ticket sales.
Fake Para that helped bust into a BBC building they vacated years ago during a protest against a lockdown that's over certainly resonates with me, though maybe not in the way intended.
"It saddens me to say that there were Para veterans and possibly serving Army personnel involved in this. At least 2 have been reported to the police and all others will be rooted out like a cancer."
Hoo, the real deal! The whiskers of the PBer who got himself in a lather over ex services muscle Marys marching in to protect Winnie's stachoo will be twitching.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
The reason London Underground needed to run a full service is that when they ran partial services there was complaints about over crowding.
And I need to find the links but usage of public transport is related to the frequency of the service. The less frequent the service the less popular it is. Knock a service down by 25% and usage may well drop 30% or more.
So we get to cut funding to trains by 25% and overcrowding will drop by a further 5% or more on top of that? Win, win.
(This post is only partially tongue in cheek)
It's interesting that we often view public transport as something which must directly pay for itself, when roads and pavements are seen as investments to boost the economy and pay for itself only indirectly.
There will never be a Beeching Report for getting rid of vast numbers of small residential roads since the fuel duty/VED paid by drivers on the roads is less than the maintenance costs. And nor should there be, road links are part of general infrastructure as well as being a public service people have a right to. But I do find it a tad painful we don't tend to see bus or tube services the same way. TfL clearly boosts London's economy vastly beyond its ticket sales.
Roads do directly pay for themselves many times over. VED and Fuel Duty pays an order of magnitude more than what we spend on roads.
Trains don't. Trains are heavily, heavily subsidised.
If we spent what we raise from the roads on improving the roads, let alone actually subsidising roads like we subsidise trains, then how much better would our road network be?
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
A Concession agreement is very different, the government owns the infrastrucre and the revenue, and pays only a management fee and commission to the private operator.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
Evidence that nationalising railways and running them that way works in the UK?
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
Sebastian Payne @SebastianEPayne Nor is Johnson’s comment just a problem in England, Thatcher's standing in Scotland is even lower. His visit north of the border was carefully choreographed to avoid controversy. But as one senior Scottish Tory says, “it was all ruined in one sentence”.
'We need squirrels, lots of squirrels, like yesterday!'
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
The business people running SWR do a piss poor job and should be sacked immediately. Why are they rewarded with a pay rise despite seeing performance decline?
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
The business people running SWR do a piss poor job and should be sacked immediately. Why are they rewarded with a pay rise despite seeing performance decline?
Because they have a franchise agreement, rather than a concession agreement.
Their compensation is presumably compliant with the contract they signed. If the government issue one-sided contracts, that’s not the fault of the company on the other side.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
One of the thing that amuses me about conversations about the railways is that, eventually, it comes down to "I'm a passenger! I know how to run the railway!"
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
South Western Failway should be stripped of the franchise immediately.
South West Trains ran an ok service for 20 years and then in 2017 they were stripped of the franchise because of 'competition'.
That was not a real competition of course because anyone can make an undercutting bid, take the sales bonuses that come with winning the contract, and either then either bugger-off into the sunset or keep their fingers crossed and hope for the best.
That appears to be what South Western Railway did. They won the contract and services have been crap ever since.
I've not followed this in detail, but a cursory look at some of the allegations makes me think that he's got something of a point. In the same way that we kind of recognise that we should see George Washington having slaves in the historical context, and judge him on whether he treated them well and freed them, we should perhaps acknowledge that it was far more socially accepted a generation ago to give some of the hugs and pats and make some of the flirty comments than any sensible politician would consider today. He's clearly not moved with the times and is therefore a silly old man. There is however still a world of difference from people who talk about grabbing women's genitals or who have a record of actual sexual exploitation.
Should he resign? I dunno. But he's not a Donald Trump or Roman Polanski, and we do an injustice to victims of very serious abuse if we blur all such cases together.
But the way he seemed to grab the cheeks of grown adults as if they were small children - that to me looked like creepy power play.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
South Western Failway should be stripped of the franchise immediately.
Can I put Thameslink at the front of that queue? Such a bunch of scam artists and the parent companies are state owned anyway, just other states suckling at the teat of UK taxpayer subsidies.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
One of the thing that amuses me about conversations about the railways is that, eventually, it comes down to "I'm a passenger! I know how to run the railway!"
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
I remember British Railways and nobody should want to go back to those days
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
The business people running SWR do a piss poor job and should be sacked immediately. Why are they rewarded with a pay rise despite seeing performance decline?
Because they have a franchise agreement, rather than a concession agreement.
Their compensation is presumably compliant with the contract they signed. If the government issue one-sided contracts, that’s not the fault of the company on the other side.
Also: why is SWR apparently failing? Is it the fault of the management or employees, and/or are other factors outside their control harming them? for instance, might the 27-day strike in 2019/2020 over DOO (*) be something to do with it?
(*) There is a poster on another forum who argues vehemently against *any* DOO, and wants guards put on existing DOO routes. He also argues that driverless cars are brilliant. He works on the railway, and kind-of misses that driverless cars are orders of magnitude more difficult to create than DOO, and that driverless cars *may* have a major impact on rail travel.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
Yes we can all see the massive advantage the Inter City East Coast mainline franchise has obtained from being run by 'business people' at various times. Three private comanies have run the franchise in the past 15 years, of which three have failed to fulfill the contract.
A 100% failure rate for 'business people' running that franchise.
Has Gavin Williamson resigned yet for creating this devalued generation of A Level grades.
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
It's completely ridiculous too, and the denials that it's grade inflation are just hilarious. I guess Boris has the same attitude to the nation's children as he does to his own, why else would he keep Gavin Williamson in charge? The guy is a disaster.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
One of the thing that amuses me about conversations about the railways is that, eventually, it comes down to "I'm a passenger! I know how to run the railway!"
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
I remember British Railways and nobody should want to go back to those days
1980s-era BR was actually quite efficient. But it was also managing a shrinking system, something that's much easier to do than managing an expanding system. You are rationalising and cutting, rather than building. It was also - with a couple of exceptions - not customer focussed.
The pre-Covid expansion in passenger numbers after privatisation would have seemed like an impossible dream in the mid-1980s. Likewise safety (yes, really). The only disappointment is that railfreight didn't pick up to the same degree - and that was partly because of the death of loadhaul coal.
We Londoners of course remember his time as Mayor of our great city.
Yes, he beat Ken Livingstone to get re-elected but his tenure was unremarkable at best.
He was a billion times better than the twat Sadiq khan. He just was. No one likes khan. He’s pointless. Many Londoners look back on Boris (and Ken) fondly. No one will reminisce nostalgically about khan
We can argue about objective merit, but when it comes to popularity we should be clear that Boris won his elections with 53.2% and 51.5% of the final votes compared to Khan's wins of 56.8% and 55.2%.
Khan doesn't win at random. He is popular, a lot of Londoners like him.
Bailey did better than many expected it seems, but as a non londoner it seems pretty clear that Khan is sufficiently liked to be pretty comfortable.
Doubt Khan is particularly liked - very few people I know, including Labour voters, have much good to say about him. But he is Labour and that is a big advantage in London.
People say this – that Londoners would elect a donkey with a red rosette – but of the six Mayoral elections since the post was created, only three were won by Labour. That's fifty per cent. Half.
I mean where is the coincidence in the first and third set of pictures?
Only the 2nd is a coincidence or of course the slogan could have been nicked. But even if a coincidence that is the whole point of coincidences. You don't go around pointing out the thousands on non coincidences do you? You only notice the very few that are coincidences. Coincidences are the unlikely things that will happen in the thousands of things that don't, if that makes sense. So they will happen and we all go 'what a coincidence'.
Same argument for all those people who argue there must be a god because how could we be here like this without one. Well of course we can only say that because we are here. In all those many more places where sentient beings don't exist, nobody is saying ' bugger there can't be a god if this is all that was created'
The last picture is truncated. Her outfit is identical
Fake Para that helped bust into a BBC building they vacated years ago during a protest against a lockdown that's over certainly resonates with me, though maybe not in the way intended.
"It saddens me to say that there were Para veterans and possibly serving Army personnel involved in this. At least 2 have been reported to the police and all others will be rooted out like a cancer."
Plenty of PARA Reg wear their berets like that if that's what people are worried about.
Has Gavin Williamson resigned yet for creating this devalued generation of A Level grades.
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
It's completely ridiculous too, and the denials that it's grade inflation are just hilarious. I guess Boris has the same attitude to the nation's children as he does to his own, why else would he keep Gavin Williamson in charge? The guy is a disaster.
Are people denying grade inflation? Best suggestion I heard today was that the method used this year eliminates the 10% who have a bad day on the exam, and thus boosts the grades overall. As I work at uni, I have a stake in this. I don’t care what method is used, only that it is fair for the students. But ideally we need less variation year on year as it helps our recruitment. It’s not just take all you can, at least for some of us.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
Because I understand the issues of having state ran interference. Plus I understand the data which is not on your side.
But if you wish to go on your own anecdotal data then did you go on British Rail every day so you can make a before and after like for like comparison? Or are you talking out of your rear with only half the experience?
Has Gavin Williamson resigned yet for creating this devalued generation of A Level grades.
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
It's completely ridiculous too, and the denials that it's grade inflation are just hilarious. I guess Boris has the same attitude to the nation's children as he does to his own, why else would he keep Gavin Williamson in charge? The guy is a disaster.
As someone who in about two to four years time will start hiring some of this cohort I'm going to pretty much ignore their A Level results.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
One of the thing that amuses me about conversations about the railways is that, eventually, it comes down to "I'm a passenger! I know how to run the railway!"
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
I remember British Railways and nobody should want to go back to those days
1980s-era BR was actually quite efficient. But it was also managing a shrinking system, something that's much easier to do than managing an expanding system. You are rationalising and cutting, rather than building. It was also - with a couple of exceptions - not customer focussed.
The pre-Covid expansion in passenger numbers after privatisation would have seemed like an impossible dream in the mid-1980s. Likewise safety (yes, really). The only disappointment is that railfreight didn't pick up to the same degree - and that was partly because of the death of loadhaul coal.
I used British Railways most every working day between 1960 and 1963 and it was terrible
I see we are back to anecdotal stories about I know somebody who got it despite been jabbed etc etc etc.
Not to downplay that unfortunately people will get it, some will get it bad, but we don't do this for any other disease. We all know somebody who got cancer, had a terrible heart attack etc etc etc, with doctors saying they had a lucky escape there, and we don't then run into the fall out shelter.
Humans are terrible at assessing risk and fixate on the horror stories e.g. why people are shit scared of shark attacks, despite you having basically no risk of actually suffering on, in comparison to getting in their car every day (and many being very naughty and driving at speed).
What we need to see is the latest data on how the vaccines are holding up. The last time it all looked bang in line with the initial PHE estimates with well into the 90% reduction in hospitalization, and nothing like the initial scare data from Israel. The US is also looking good at the moment in terms of among the vaccinated.
The data isn’t being released transparently or promptly, so all we have are anecdotes and second hand stories. I’ve got another second hand story for you from someone tangentially involved. That anyone still arguing boosters are not necessary for the whole country is now seen as the stupid person in the room.
Ive got another one @Leon will like too, direct from someone else on one of the UK government committees. That it is now taken as a given behind closed doors that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. For those that like to bet on US presidential elections, that seems pertinent I would have thought.
Yes, this is what i hear
It is now generally accepted by western intel that it came from the Wuhan labs. It is also accepted that it was quite possibly engineered to be more virulent
Whether it was actually a bio-weapon in the making is the last question
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans see a no-risk bet, that requires a massive investment guarantee that only a government or massive bank can stand behind. But if it fails, the UK government will bail it out because its national infrastructure.
To put it bluntly, profits go to for the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
So in effect, there is no advantage, not to the people actually using the trains.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
There’s a massive advantage, which is that the people in charge of running the service are businesspeople rather than politicians.
The business people running SWR do a piss poor job and should be sacked immediately. Why are they rewarded with a pay rise despite seeing performance decline?
Because they have a franchise agreement, rather than a concession agreement.
Their compensation is presumably compliant with the contract they signed. If the government issue one-sided contracts, that’s not the fault of the company on the other side.
Also: why is SWR apparently failing? Is it the fault of the management or employees, and/or are other factors outside their control harming them? for instance, might the 27-day strike in 2019/2020 over DOO (*) be something to do with it?
(*) There is a poster on another forum who argues vehemently against *any* DOO, and wants guards put on existing DOO routes. He also argues that driverless cars are brilliant. He works on the railway, and kind-of misses that driverless cars are orders of magnitude more difficult to create than DOO, and that driverless cars *may* have a major impact on rail travel.
Can’t say I’m an expert on SWR or DOO. The problem with driverless cars is still that they tell you you’re back in charge, half a second from the accident that’s going to be your fault.
But I do live in a city, that has in recent years developed a driverless metro system across three lines. Something that’s now easy if you’re doing it from scratch.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
It's just a question of when.
Some of us missed out the first stage.
Didn't John Major try to blackball him from the Candidates' List?
I suppose the interesting question is- at what point in his life did it become clear that BoJo was significantly more unsuitable for high office than other Eton-Oxford-Politics types?
Has Gavin Williamson resigned yet for creating this devalued generation of A Level grades.
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
It's completely ridiculous too, and the denials that it's grade inflation are just hilarious. I guess Boris has the same attitude to the nation's children as he does to his own, why else would he keep Gavin Williamson in charge? The guy is a disaster.
Are people denying grade inflation? Best suggestion I heard today was that the method used this year eliminates the 10% who have a bad day on the exam, and thus boosts the grades overall. As I work at uni, I have a stake in this. I don’t care what method is used, only that it is fair for the students. But ideally we need less variation year on year as it helps our recruitment. It’s not just take all you can, at least for some of us.
You'll probably need entrance exams soon. I know my sister's workplace (a big London university) is eyeing them up for next year's domestic cohort.
What would you propose? Lockdown 4? If vaccines aren't enough then what's the solution?
It’s pretty clear that vaccines give about 6 months worth of protection from catching it, but hopefully much longer lasting protection from getting seriously ill. That might be why cases have hit a stubborn plateau. I also know several people testing positive for the second time now.
If we are giving up on stopping cases, what’s most important of course is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases. This is happily far lower than where we are. But… there is a but.
Gone are the days when we could say double vaxxed people aren’t going to hospital. They are. I have an acquaintance who just spent a week on O2 despite being double vaxxed, one of the cohort done early in the year.
The vaccines probably saved his life but it was still a fairly close run thing. I imagine what we’ll see is the hospitalisations / cases ratios creep up a bit, and there will be an inevitable increase in cases with back to school/Uni/the office.
Probably and hopefully not sufficiently badly to require another “lockdown”. But I’ve little doubt that the return to the office orders will be overturned within weeks, and schools will up creek again.
Until the booster programme then gets ahead of it again. Come next winter hopefully they’ll be ahead of things a bit more than this one.
Don't forget that the booster programme is going to be primarily Pfizer which is much faster acting than AZ (about 10 days vs 25 days to reach maximum efficacy) so people who got their second doses in Feb/March will all start getting their third doses and renewed immunity by the end of September. By the end of November all of groups 1-9 should have got their third dose should they want one.
Next year’s boosters will presumably be tweaked and tested in time against delta (and whatever else), which if there’s not too much genetic drift will crush cases. This year that’s obviously not the case. And until we get boosters into the over 40s, things might be sticky.
Rishi’s Great Back To The Office coercion attempts are quite clearly coming months too early, perhaps 6 months in fact. And it’s going to increase the chances of other restrictions being introduced. I am beginning to think the chancellor wears no clothes.
The whole “Get Back to the Office” stuff is because they see the revenues from railways and city-based hospitality declining - but don’t understand that the commute is what people most hate about their job.
Most of the politicians, of course, live right in the middle of London, a few minutes from anywhere, and are not on the 06:42 from Basingstoke or Swindon five days a week.
Railways and city-based hospitality are there to serve the public.
The public is not there to serve railways and city-based hospitality.
If the railways aren't as busy any more going forwards then we should be looking at how to cut funding to the railways and redirect it to elsewhere instead - not trying to force people back onto the railways against their wishes.
Railways are there to serve shareholders, that is what private business entails.
The railways model in England has been transformed into one where the operators are almost like utility companies, in their tediousness to manage or externally evaluate. Their only real USP in tendering now will be their track record on timely and clean services, and the efficiency of their opex.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
Nationalise the railways and run them properly for the needs of the public. Some things work privately owned and other don't. That's not ideological, it's logical
The best route forward is probably going to be concession agreements, rather than franchises or public operators.
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principals apply.)
Genuine question, in such a model how does the operation honestly differ between a state concession vs one by the German Government company. What do the Germans offer?
The Germans are running it professionally and not politically.
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
Jesus Christ, have you ever been on a German state company provided train in this country?
I only take trains once every few years.
And yet you feel you have the knowledge to talk to somebody who uses them mostly every day. You really do talk out of your rear
One of the thing that amuses me about conversations about the railways is that, eventually, it comes down to "I'm a passenger! I know how to run the railway!"
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
I remember British Railways and nobody should want to go back to those days
1980s-era BR was actually quite efficient. But it was also managing a shrinking system, something that's much easier to do than managing an expanding system. You are rationalising and cutting, rather than building. It was also - with a couple of exceptions - not customer focussed.
The pre-Covid expansion in passenger numbers after privatisation would have seemed like an impossible dream in the mid-1980s. Likewise safety (yes, really). The only disappointment is that railfreight didn't pick up to the same degree - and that was partly because of the death of loadhaul coal.
I used British Railways most every working day between 1960 and 1963 and it was terrible
That's what happens when the politicians get involved.
I do wonder though just how dreadful @CorrectHorseBattery 's experience must be that he thinks "you know what would make this service better? We should have Grant Shapps more directly involved in running the train service".
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
It's just a question of when.
Some of us missed out the first stage.
Didn't John Major try to blackball him from the Candidates' List?
I suppose the interesting question is- at what point in his life did it become clear that BoJo was significantly more unsuitable for high office than other Eton-Oxford-Politics types?
Late 80s, when he was sacked from The Times for lying about catamites and trying to get his godfather to lie about it, who refused.
I mean where is the coincidence in the first and third set of pictures?
Only the 2nd is a coincidence or of course the slogan could have been nicked. But even if a coincidence that is the whole point of coincidences. You don't go around pointing out the thousands on non coincidences do you? You only notice the very few that are coincidences. Coincidences are the unlikely things that will happen in the thousands of things that don't, if that makes sense. So they will happen and we all go 'what a coincidence'.
Same argument for all those people who argue there must be a god because how could we be here like this without one. Well of course we can only say that because we are here. In all those many more places where sentient beings don't exist, nobody is saying ' bugger there can't be a god if this is all that was created'
Has Gavin Williamson resigned yet for creating this devalued generation of A Level grades.
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
It's completely ridiculous too, and the denials that it's grade inflation are just hilarious. I guess Boris has the same attitude to the nation's children as he does to his own, why else would he keep Gavin Williamson in charge? The guy is a disaster.
Are people denying grade inflation? Best suggestion I heard today was that the method used this year eliminates the 10% who have a bad day on the exam, and thus boosts the grades overall. As I work at uni, I have a stake in this. I don’t care what method is used, only that it is fair for the students. But ideally we need less variation year on year as it helps our recruitment. It’s not just take all you can, at least for some of us.
You'll probably need entrance exams soon. I know my sister's workplace (a big London university) is eyeing them up for next year's domestic cohort.
Already the case for (some) medical courses. It may become more widespread. Tbh I hope to just return to proper exams.
We Londoners of course remember his time as Mayor of our great city.
Yes, he beat Ken Livingstone to get re-elected but his tenure was unremarkable at best.
He was a billion times better than the twat Sadiq khan. He just was. No one likes khan. He’s pointless. Many Londoners look back on Boris (and Ken) fondly. No one will reminisce nostalgically about khan
We can argue about objective merit, but when it comes to popularity we should be clear that Boris won his elections with 53.2% and 51.5% of the final votes compared to Khan's wins of 56.8% and 55.2%.
Khan doesn't win at random. He is popular, a lot of Londoners like him.
Bailey did better than many expected it seems, but as a non londoner it seems pretty clear that Khan is sufficiently liked to be pretty comfortable.
Doubt Khan is particularly liked - very few people I know, including Labour voters, have much good to say about him. But he is Labour and that is a big advantage in London.
People say this – that Londoners would elect a donkey with a red rosette – but of the six Mayoral elections since the post was created, only three were won by Labour. That's fifty per cent. Half.
The problem is mostly that the Mayor, whether Khan or Johnson or Livingstone cannot do much about the things that bug Londoners, so all are considered pretty useless.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
It's just a question of when.
Some of us missed out the first stage.
Didn't John Major try to blackball him from the Candidates' List?
I suppose the interesting question is- at what point in his life did it become clear that BoJo was significantly more unsuitable for high office than other Eton-Oxford-Politics types?
Late 80s, when he was sacked from The Times for lying about catamites and trying to get his godfather to lie about it, who refused.
Er, you might want to look at the dictionary to check that you really want to use 'catamite'. Either that, or it is news to me.
'Sixty-year-old Brian was one of the last miners at “the Big K”.... “Boris is our guy. He promised to sort out Brexit and he’s not like those other Tories. He’s promised to make things better.”
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
From "Boris is our guy" to "What a bastard!". The two stages of dealing with Mr Johnson that everyone goes through. Doesn't matter whether it's personal or political.
It's just a question of when.
Some of us missed out the first stage.
Didn't John Major try to blackball him from the Candidates' List?
I suppose the interesting question is- at what point in his life did it become clear that BoJo was significantly more unsuitable for high office than other Eton-Oxford-Politics types?
It was very clear when he was an MP, which is why he had no support from MPs, and indeed not much from the party at large except as an amusing after-dinner speaker (and then not always), until they alighted on him in 2019 precisely because he was unsuited to high office and told them untruths they wanted to hear.
I said at the time, Rishi "wrote" the letter to Londoners saying "Back Shaun Bailey" for the Mayoralty, and I wondered if that was down to Boris being unpopular in the Capital
Comments
You end up needing the other services running to have the drivers and trains in the right place.
Why You’re Probably Not So Great at Risk Assessment
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/smarter-living/why-youre-probably-not-so-great-at-risk-assessment.html
Why Are People Bad at Evaluating Risks?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-inertia-trap/201303/why-are-people-bad-evaluating-risks
Why the Human Brain Is a Poor Judge of Risk
https://www.wired.com/2007/03/security-matters0322/
Its not really up for debate, the science is fairly settled on the matter.
What they’re looking at is the raw GDP data, where every pound spent on the season ticket, the Starbucks and the Pret is a positive.
What they’re missing, is that for most people, these expenditures are seen as massive negatives.
That's astounding. I don't want to coerce anyone to have the vaccine, but I think we ought to be pushing every button we can think of to encourage the vaccination rate up. It will make a big difference to the demand placed on the NHS this winter, which will be important in terms of keeping up with elective surgery.
𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝘼𝙈
Tune in Monday-Friday at 9am for your daily digest of morning politics, insight, and punchy debate.
https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1425127094946877444?s=20
Sister shows 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙇𝙪𝙣𝙘𝙝𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 with @GloriaDePiero and 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙋𝙈 with @DarrenGBNews will also air at 1200 and 1530 - coming soon!Party popper
https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1425127574951415812?s=20
----
GB News change their show lineup more often than I change my bedding.
All of the revenue risk has already been assumed by the taxpayer, initially by emergency covid measures. As we speak, that arrangement is being legally formalised for operators into the medium term, who are currently bidding for the concession contracts on a preferred / sole bidder basis. Massive tax payer funded bail out for largely foreign owned operators basically, and they’re still free to pay dividends in the mean time. So if that is what you mean by “there to serve the shareholders”, yes. But it’s being done without any of risk that private business normally entails.
I kind of feel this too. Brexit itself doesn't bother me that much. I have no great concern for the economy outside the EU, it'll chug on, and life in England is hardly going to plunge into the cultural dark ages.
So why was it like a mule had kicked me in the stomach on 24th June 2016? It was because I just felt that the less elevated side of our nation had prevailed.
And I must stress here - and I really do stress this - that by this I do NOT mean that all the individuals who voted Remain are cut from better cloth than all of those who voted Leave. I don't mean that at all.
It is interesting as I have had this discussion with @Philip_Thompson and @HYUFD in the past on this. Like a few other things they tend to have opposing views on the level of interference in the market by Govts.
(This post is only partially tongue in cheek)
This has most of the benefits of private operation, and most of the benefits of public ownership.
(This post is totally unrelated to the extensive work I’m currently doing on concession agreements. For utilities, rather than railways, but the same principles apply.)
https://twitter.com/PatrioticCougar/status/1424900178042044417?s=20
Why does anyone bother? I feel the same way about airlines, which are famously capital-intensive and risky. But at least they are glamorous.
Should he resign? I dunno. But he's not a Donald Trump or Roman Polanski, and we do an injustice to victims of very serious abuse if we blur all such cases together.
https://twitter.com/TheParachuteReg/status/1424834003971026947
"It saddens me to say that there were Para veterans and possibly serving Army personnel involved in this. At least 2 have been reported to the police and all others will be rooted out like a cancer."
WFH costs the Treasury billions, that companies and individuals are saving.
... his views on the prime minister had changed. “What a bastard! I can’t believe it.” He was angry not about the pandemic or government policy but an off-the-cuff remark Johnson made in Scotland last week.'
Almost every single argument made by those who want the state to interfere, is precisely why the British state should not.
There will never be a Beeching Report for getting rid of vast numbers of small residential roads since the fuel duty/VED paid by drivers on the roads is less than the maintenance costs. And nor should there be, road links are part of general infrastructure as well as being a public service people have a right to. But I do find it a tad painful we don't tend to see bus or tube services the same way. TfL clearly boosts London's economy vastly beyond its ticket sales.
The whiskers of the PBer who got himself in a lather over ex services muscle Marys marching in to protect Winnie's stachoo will be twitching.
"Although Guido hears the ‘more newsroomlike’ replacement studio will take a while longer to be built…"
https://order-order.com/2021/08/10/gb-news-launching-four-new-political-programmes/
They must be burning through money faster than an early 2000s dot com startup!
Trains don't. Trains are heavily, heavily subsidised.
If we spent what we raise from the roads on improving the roads, let alone actually subsidising roads like we subsidise trains, then how much better would our road network be?
To put it bluntly, profits go to the private sector, and losses are for the public sector. Which is why so many foreign companies took the bet on being the private sector partner.
A Concession agreement is very different, the government owns the infrastrucre and the revenue, and pays only a management fee and commission to the private operator.
I knew that was the case, just nice to have it confirmed. Phil would no doubt believe that SWR is a model of efficiency, being run by the same people as the Hong Kong Metro.
@SebastianEPayne
Nor is Johnson’s comment just a problem in England, Thatcher's standing in Scotland is even lower.
His visit north of the border was carefully choreographed to avoid controversy. But as one senior Scottish Tory says, “it was all ruined in one sentence”.
'We need squirrels, lots of squirrels, like yesterday!'
It's just a question of when.
10-08-21 23,510
09-08-21 25,161
08-08-21 27,429
07-08-21 28,612
06-08-21 31,808
They are close to worthless aren't they which is harsh on the genuinely top students.
Their compensation is presumably compliant with the contract they signed. If the government issue one-sided contracts, that’s not the fault of the company on the other side.
It leads to such hilarity as the unions / Labour producing long and worthy documents about how they would change the system, that only mentions railfreight once. Because railfreight is evidently unimpotant.
The railways are a massively complex system, and the idea that you, as a regular passenger, automatically know how it should be run or structured is slightly odd.
I go to the supermarket regularly. I don't pretend to fully understand their logistics chains, or how to improve it.
That was not a real competition of course because anyone can make an undercutting bid, take the sales bonuses that come with winning the contract, and either then either bugger-off into the sunset or keep their fingers crossed and hope for the best.
That appears to be what South Western Railway did. They won the contract and services have been crap ever since.
Hurrah for free market competition!
(*) There is a poster on another forum who argues vehemently against *any* DOO, and wants guards put on existing DOO routes. He also argues that driverless cars are brilliant. He works on the railway, and kind-of misses that driverless cars are orders of magnitude more difficult to create than DOO, and that driverless cars *may* have a major impact on rail travel.
A 100% failure rate for 'business people' running that franchise.
The pre-Covid expansion in passenger numbers after privatisation would have seemed like an impossible dream in the mid-1980s. Likewise safety (yes, really). The only disappointment is that railfreight didn't pick up to the same degree - and that was partly because of the death of loadhaul coal.
It works!
I am hovering over the Alps
Not to say he is or isn't a walt.
As I work at uni, I have a stake in this. I don’t care what method is used, only that it is fair for the students. But ideally we need less variation year on year as it helps our recruitment. It’s not just take all you can, at least for some of us.
But if you wish to go on your own anecdotal data then did you go on British Rail every day so you can make a before and after like for like comparison? Or are you talking out of your rear with only half the experience?
It is now generally accepted by western intel that it came from the Wuhan labs. It is also accepted that it was quite possibly engineered to be more virulent
Whether it was actually a bio-weapon in the making is the last question
But I do live in a city, that has in recent years developed a driverless metro system across three lines. Something that’s now easy if you’re doing it from scratch.
I suppose the interesting question is- at what point in his life did it become clear that BoJo was significantly more unsuitable for high office than other Eton-Oxford-Politics types?
I do wonder though just how dreadful @CorrectHorseBattery 's experience must be that he thinks "you know what would make this service better? We should have Grant Shapps more directly involved in running the train service".
Brisbane 2032 maybe. They'll probably throw in Aussie rules football too for that one!
(Thinks: is boomerang-throwing a competitive sport? No, well there's still time!)