Confirms that Boris is the candidate of Leavers and the Northern and Midlands Red Wall still.
Sunak would do better in more Remain London but it is largely safe Labour now. Though Sunak might limit losses to the LDs in Remain areas of the Home Counties too it is still the Red Wall where most of the marginals are
Also, Cornwall. My Cornish Mum ADORES Boris. It’s almost sexual. But I prefer not to speculate
But it is a thing. The southwest of England loves Boris, I think it is because they are naturally Tory but they also like a bit of maverick non-conformism (cf Methodism) so they really like Bojo. And they don’t give a fuck about his private life, being very live-and-let-live
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
ITV reporting cricket is seeking to become an Olympic sport
Noooo. Olympic sports should be for amateurs, and they should spend four years doing nothing else but wishing for that performance. Golf, Tennis, Basketball etc totally devalues the medal.
'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!'
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
ITV reporting cricket is seeking to become an Olympic sport
Noooo. Olympic sports should be for amateurs, and they should spend four years doing nothing else but wishing for that performance. Golf, Tennis, Basketball etc totally devalues the medal.
Much worse than that.
India will eventually win the gold a the Olympics and it'll start their obsession with the Olympics the way winning the 1983 world cup did for one day cricket and the 2007 T20 world cup with T20 cricket.
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Though some mix of the two working together could succeed
ITV reporting cricket is seeking to become an Olympic sport
Noooo. Olympic sports should be for amateurs, and they should spend four years doing nothing else but wishing for that performance. Golf, Tennis, Basketball etc totally devalues the medal.
I agree with your reasoning, but I can see why the IOC and the ICC would both be keen. For the IOC it will boost the Olympics reach into India, and for the ICC it's an opportunity to advertise cricket to the rest of the world, particularly the US and China.
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
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.
Easier to do from scratch. Much harder, if not impossible, to retrofit onto a large network.
You have to be careful about 'driverless' when it comes to trains. Many London Underground lines are automated; all the 'driver' usually does is check the doors are safe to open and close, then start the train. Unless you have platform doors and other systems, you still need a DLR-style 'train captain' on board to fulfil that role.
Tube train drivers have to be one of the best-paid, least-work jobs there is. £55k a year. But even that saving, amongst all the drivers, does not make up for the cost of retrofitting the network to allow true driverless trains.
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
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Neither has the privatised railway. I think you are confusing the march of technology with managerial improvement. British Rail was improving hugely in the 1960s to 1980s: I was travelling regularly on it and I can assure you of that. The 1960-63 period was, after all, the rundown of the steam locomotives.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Neither has the privatised railway. I think you are confusing the march of technology with managerial improvement. British Rail was improving hugely in the 1960s to 1980s: I was travelling regularly on it and I can assure you of that. The 1960-63 period was, after all, the rundown of the steam locomotives.
I'd disagree with that, in part. It certainly wasn't improving much in the 1960s; and the 1970s were a real low. It did start to turn around in the 1980s, however. The exception for the 1970s (the only one?) was the introduction of the HST 125. Otherwise it was a period of regression and stagnation.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
There are people that would have you believe that the nationalised railways of the 60s and 70s were good though. They weren't - they were dreadful. Admittedly I'm more 70s and 80s in that view.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
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.
At this stage, I am assuming that he has a photograph of Johnson either selling state secrets to the Russians or shagging a goat.
ITV reporting cricket is seeking to become an Olympic sport
Noooo. Olympic sports should be for amateurs, and they should spend four years doing nothing else but wishing for that performance. Golf, Tennis, Basketball etc totally devalues the medal.
Much worse than that.
India will eventually win the gold a the Olympics and it'll start their obsession with the Olympics the way winning the 1983 world cup did for one day cricket and the 2007 T20 world cup with T20 cricket.
The most heinous aspect of British rule in India wasn't blowing people from cannons, or the - shall we say - less than stellar responses to the various famines over the years, or even the Amritsar massacre.
No, for me the single most heinous thing the British ever did in Indian Subcontinent was teaching the locals the utter snooze-fest that is Cricket! If they taught the Indians and Pakistanis how to play football, by contrast, India could have by now become the Brazil of Asia, and perhaps modern Pakistan might play the part of Argentina!
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
I'm shocked.
And have you seen what Petacci lost her last job for? Am I allowed to say "pair of shysters" on here?
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.
Easier to do from scratch. Much harder, if not impossible, to retrofit onto a large network.
You have to be careful about 'driverless' when it comes to trains. Many London Underground lines are automated; all the 'driver' usually does is check the doors are safe to open and close, then start the train. Unless you have platform doors and other systems, you still need a DLR-style 'train captain' on board to fulfil that role.
Tube train drivers have to be one of the best-paid, least-work jobs there is. £55k a year. But even that saving, amongst all the drivers, does not make up for the cost of retrofitting the network to allow true driverless trains.
Yes, there is still a need for trained ‘captains’ on trains, but with radio comms to the centre, they’re little more than administrators.
Most of the Underground could now be driverless if it wasn’t for the unions. AIUI they’re on £55k basic, plus extensive bonuses and overtime, and the jobs are only ever available to internal candidates who have done their ‘duty’ in getting to the line.
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.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
Beeching was absolutely necessary. You can argue that mistakes were made - the Waverley Line being a classic example - but the vast majority of the closures were justified. There was massive duplication of routes. even the Great Central closure was probably correct. Sadly.
In addition: 1) I frequently see 'Beeching Cuts!' blamed for lines that closed well before his report, or for lines (e.g. Matlock to Buxton) that were not in his report. Likewise, some lines that he said should be close, were kept open for political reasons - e.g. the mid-Wales line. 2) Beeching did not close a single inch of railway line. The politicians did. They could have ignored his report, as Thatcher did the Serpell Report in ?1982?.
I think a bit much is made of the "Bailey did well" narrative.
He was basically on a par with Goldsmith in 2016. That was a round of local elections that Corbyn narrowly won (by 1%) as opposed to 2021, which Starmer lost (by 7%).
What Bailey did is beat the expectations game - expectations were extremely low, so matching Goldsmith was deemed a success even though he clearly did much worse than the average Conservative council candidate in the UK in 2021. If Starmer has any sort of recovery from poor local elections this year, he needn't worry too much about London borough council elections in 2022.
I'd also note Bailey ultimately ran quite an effective core vote strategy - basically tough on crime, soft on cars. That's the sort of approach that gave him no serious chance of winning, but little real risk of crashing and burning - there are not enough votes in it to win in London, but enough to do alright with a blue rosette.
Some polls were suggesting Khan would win on the first round but he only polled 40%. Labour complacency? Perhaps. Turnout was down to 42% from 45% in 2016 and I suppose that might be part of it Goldsmith got 35% of the first preference votes, Bailey 35.3% so it's only a marginal improvement.
A small part of Khan's vote fragmented around the large field of also-rans, again perhaps because of the media narrative of an easy re-election win.
The 2018 results were very good for Labour - they outpolled the Conservatives 44-29 across London, won double the number of Council seats and pushed the Conservatives down to just over 500, a worse result than 1994 which was pretty disastrous nationally.
Looking at the Boroughs, can we see Labour gaining places Barnet and Wandsworth this time? I'm not convinced.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
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
I'm hearing differently. That the lab theory is fading amongst serious analysts. Looking like a 20% shot max. Not low enough - yet - to resume mocking but that's the direction of travel.
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.
One thing that almost everyone can agree on is that he ought to resign, or be fired, as soon as possible. He is useless.
Which is why he is kept on. Even Johnson looks competent in comparison. It has the same as going on the pull with an ugly mate, you benefit by the comparison...
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.
Easier to do from scratch. Much harder, if not impossible, to retrofit onto a large network.
You have to be careful about 'driverless' when it comes to trains. Many London Underground lines are automated; all the 'driver' usually does is check the doors are safe to open and close, then start the train. Unless you have platform doors and other systems, you still need a DLR-style 'train captain' on board to fulfil that role.
Tube train drivers have to be one of the best-paid, least-work jobs there is. £55k a year. But even that saving, amongst all the drivers, does not make up for the cost of retrofitting the network to allow true driverless trains.
Yes, there is still a need for trained ‘captains’ on trains, but with radio comms to the centre, they’re little more than administrators.
Most of the Underground could now be driverless if it wasn’t for the unions. AIUI they’re on £55k basic, plus extensive bonuses and overtime, and the jobs are only ever available to internal candidates who have done their ‘duty’ in getting to the line.
But that's the point, as with the DLR, you need someone on the trains to perform that role. They're just called 'train captain' or somesuch. And their pay will not be much short of that of a train driver. DLR's train attendants earn well over £40k.
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.
We used to keep old trains for low utilisation rotas, in the same way that bus companies use old buses cascaded from front line service, to use as school buses. Now all trains have to be standardised, and drivers aren’t allowed to drive just any train, only specific types they are certified to drive.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Neither has the privatised railway. I think you are confusing the march of technology with managerial improvement. British Rail was improving hugely in the 1960s to 1980s: I was travelling regularly on it and I can assure you of that. The 1960-63 period was, after all, the rundown of the steam locomotives.
I'd disagree with that, in part. It certainly wasn't improving much in the 1960s; and the 1970s were a real low. It did start to turn around in the 1980s, however. The exception for the 1970s (the only one?) was the introduction of the HST 125. Otherwise it was a period of regression and stagnation.
You're right. I was rounding too much - should hgave been 1965 on, and the ECML was (and remained) my main experience, so it would certainly be true for my experience with ther Deltics and then the 125s and 225s.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
Beeching was absolutely necessary. You can argue that mistakes were made - the Waverley Line being a classic example - but the vast majority of the closures were justified. There was massive duplication of routes. even the Great Central closure was probably correct. Sadly.
In addition: 1) I frequently see 'Beeching Cuts!' blamed for lines that closed well before his report, or for lines (e.g. Matlock to Buxton) that were not in his report. Likewise, some lines that he said should be close, were kept open for political reasons - e.g. the mid-Wales line. 2) Beeching did not close a single inch of railway line. The politicians did. They could have ignored his report, as Thatcher did the Serpell Report in ?1982?.
In fairness, Serpell himself advised Thatcher to ignore his report, because there was no such thing as a ‘commercially viable railway network’ on the terms laid out so if she closed what he recommended, she’d end up closing the lot with serious knock-on consequences.
That applied to both the ‘pure’ network he put forward and the one for reduced subsidy.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
Did you experience BR 60 years ago
No, but you by definition experienced the Tory governments of 60 years ago. Big G, exculpating Tory governments ancient and modern, blaming every ill of today on Drakeford and Sturgeon.
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
Yes, but you have to remember the environment they were trying to manage in, particularly the strength of the unions back then.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
I'm shocked.
And have you seen what Petacci lost her last job for? Am I allowed to say "pair of shysters" on here?
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Pinging Cyclefree to wonder why its an all male lineup.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
I had more useful things such as Latin, Greek and Maths with Mechanics to do. And have publicly acknowledged my my aberrant and momentary lack fo faith in TSE and sit on the stool of repentance.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Pinging Cyclefree to wonder why its an all male lineup.
She could do the intro and explain why Cressida Dick and assorted bankers shouldresign on this day.
And Beibherli C could come in after TSE and talk about Ireland and shoes.
Conversation Poly Network @PolyNetwork2 Important Notice: We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain
@ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses: ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
Ah - got it. Piggy. But 'successive' must apply to "Conservative Eton and Oxford PMs" not PMs which is what I had thought.
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.
One thing that almost everyone can agree on is that he ought to resign, or be fired, as soon as possible. He is useless.
The only thing I would add though, is it’s not just him. The DfE, OFSTED and OFQUAL all need scrubbing as well.
As do Nick Gibb, Amanda Spielman, Sean Harford and Simon Lebus.
There just is no way they can regain the confidence of anyone involved in education, and that’s not just teachers, it’s parents and students as well.
It's actually very unhealthy imo this associating all the shit in our schooling system with the personage of Gavin Williamson.
Arguably, actually, Gibb and Spielman are both far more culpable than Williamson as they were responsible for many of the mistakes - e.g. on exam reform and academisation - that have left us in this mess.
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
I'm shocked.
And have you seen what Petacci lost her last job for? Am I allowed to say "pair of shysters" on here?
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
I'm hearing differently. That the lab theory is fading amongst serious analysts. Looking like a 20% shot max. Not low enough - yet - to resume mocking but that's the direction of travel.
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
I'm hearing differently. That the lab theory is fading amongst serious analysts. Looking like a 20% shot max. Not low enough - yet - to resume mocking but that's the direction of travel.
I mean, just, LOL
The champagne must have been stronger than you realised.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
The story that Cameron waved his willy at a pig's head in a Piers Gaveston society ritual.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
The story that Cameron waved his willy at a pig's head in a Piers Gaveston society ritual.
Yes, I get it now.
Of course, it was put forward by Oakeshott and Cashcroft, who are both totally untrustworthy.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Though some mix of the two working together could succeed
The two recent periods when the Intercity East Coast franchise has been run publicly seem to have been ok.
The 'mix of the two working together' on the East Coast franchise seems to be: private enterprise fails miserably before the state picks up the pieces... rinse and repeat.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Though some mix of the two working together could succeed
The two recent periods when the Intercity East Coast franchise has been run publicly seem to have been ok.
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
I'm shocked.
And have you seen what Petacci lost her last job for? Am I allowed to say "pair of shysters" on here?
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.
One thing that almost everyone can agree on is that he ought to resign, or be fired, as soon as possible. He is useless.
Which is why he is kept on. Even Johnson looks competent in comparison. It has the same as going on the pull with an ugly mate, you benefit by the comparison...
Yep. Exactly. As I posted just the other day it’s why I like motorway service stations. They make me feel like George Clooney.
But there should be no place for such shallowness at the top of Government. Johnson really does lack substance. He's pathetic.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
Agreed, but the service was often crap *before* Dr Beeching closed the line.
Infrequent, slow, unreliable, with poor connections, and often unclean.
That's one of the reasons why he closed so much - BR just idled through dire services on far too many lines through the 1940s and 50s.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
Did you experience BR 60 years ago
No, but you by definition experienced the Tory governments of 60 years ago. Big G, exculpating Tory governments ancient and modern, blaming every ill of today on Drakeford and Sturgeon.
You do realise that my rail journeys were largely in Scotland in that period, and the unions had a strangle hold on the whole network which was throughout the UK hence British Railways
And of course Sturgeon and Drakeford have their moments but they are far from the perfection you idolise
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
Yes but the experience of the state running railways has not been a happy one
Though some mix of the two working together could succeed
The two recent periods when the Intercity East Coast franchise has been run publicly seem to have been ok.
The 'mix of the two working together' on the East Coast franchise seems to be:
Private enterprise fails miserably before the state picks up the pieces... rinse and repeat.
Both times the state ran it they did a good job. Far better than the private companies.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Pinging Cyclefree to wonder why its an all male lineup.
Conversation Poly Network @PolyNetwork2 Important Notice: We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain
@ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses: ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71
$600m missing. How many cinema tickets is that?
Binance, you say….
The ‘market’ banned by the FCA a couple of months ago…
Conversation Poly Network @PolyNetwork2 Important Notice: We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain
@ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses: ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71
$600m missing. How many cinema tickets is that?
"Poly Network is a group for realizing blockchain interoperability, building the next generation internet."
'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.
I'm an expert in Boris Johnson's troubles with catamites.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
For five years Colin Lucas was my boss and he was also Boris's godfather. It is not breaching any confidence to note that Lucas, former Vice Chancellor of Oxford, did not have a positive view of his god child.
I'm shocked.
And have you seen what Petacci lost her last job for? Am I allowed to say "pair of shysters" on here?
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Pinging Cyclefree to wonder why its an all male lineup.
A betting section is notable by its absence
Betting? Do we ever talk about that? I hadn’t noticed.
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.
We used to keep old trains for low utilisation rotas, in the same way that bus companies use old buses cascaded from front line service, to use as school buses. Now all trains have to be standardised, and drivers aren’t allowed to drive just any train, only specific types they are certified to drive.
Sets of Mark 1s on Summer Saturday services to the seaside. With freight locomotives going spare at the weekend providing traction.
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?
Firstly, even if this were true it doubtless wouldn't be true for countless quiet roads. But we never use terms like 'subsidised' for those.
Secondly, I must say the figures I've seen disagree with yours quite markedly, particularly once pollution/other indirect costs of road transport are factored in. It certainly depends how you measure it and what you count as a cost of roads/driving, but there are serious studies/reports making this argument. For a good collection of them, albeit on a rather dated and ranty website, see this page below.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
Did you experience BR 60 years ago
No, but you by definition experienced the Tory governments of 60 years ago. Big G, exculpating Tory governments ancient and modern, blaming every ill of today on Drakeford and Sturgeon.
You do realise that my rail journeys were largely in Scotland in that period, and the unions had a strangle hold on the whole network which was throughout the UK hence British Railways
And of course Sturgeon and Drakeford have their moments but they are far from the perfection you idolise
Conversation Poly Network @PolyNetwork2 Important Notice: We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain
@ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses: ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71
$600m missing. How many cinema tickets is that?
Binance, you say….
The ‘market’ banned by the FCA a couple of months ago…
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
Agreed, but the service was often crap *before* Dr Beeching closed the line.
Infrequent, slow, unreliable, with poor connections, and often unclean.
That's one of the reasons why he closed so much - BR just idled through dire services on far too many lines through the 1940s and 50s.
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
Thank you Dr Beeching.
I really objected to Beeching then and am pleased some of his closures are to be re-opened
Beeching was absolutely necessary. You can argue that mistakes were made - the Waverley Line being a classic example - but the vast majority of the closures were justified. There was massive duplication of routes. even the Great Central closure was probably correct. Sadly.
In addition: 1) I frequently see 'Beeching Cuts!' blamed for lines that closed well before his report, or for lines (e.g. Matlock to Buxton) that were not in his report. Likewise, some lines that he said should be close, were kept open for political reasons - e.g. the mid-Wales line. 2) Beeching did not close a single inch of railway line. The politicians did. They could have ignored his report, as Thatcher did the Serpell Report in ?1982?.
I have a romantic attachment to virtually any railway line (and mourn closure of them all) but I think Beeching overreached by 20-30%.
Also, some of his thinking was muddled. One of his irritations was not closing the ECML because the route to Scotland was "duplicated" by the WCML, and he didn't see cutting off Berwick upon Tweed as a big deal. And he was still unrepentant in the 1980s, almost 20 years later.
He went for an enthusiastic interpretation of his brief and took it too far.
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
With respect Big_G, lots of things were terrible 60 years ago. Look at the (then privately run) British Car industry in the early 60s.
The Tory government who had then been nominally in charge of British Railways for 10+ years must have been really terrible!
The UK health secretary, Sajid Javid, said preparations are being made to offer Covid booster jabs in the UK from next month, but a leading expert suggested that such a move would not be supported by the science and that it was likely unnecessary. The head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Prof Andrew Pollard, said data so far suggested that the vaccines were holding out against the virus that causes Covid-19 and that the doses would be much better used elsewhere in the world.
Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, Pollard told MPs, since the vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid. Therefore reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population is “mythical”, although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, he said.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Pinging Cyclefree to wonder why its an all male lineup.
A betting section is notable by its absence
Betting? Do we ever talk about that? I hadn’t noticed.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
The story that Cameron waved his willy at a pig's head in a Piers Gaveston society ritual.
Yes, I get it now.
Of course, it was put forward by Oakeshott and Cashcroft, who are both totally untrustworthy.
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.
We used to keep old trains for low utilisation rotas, in the same way that bus companies use old buses cascaded from front line service, to use as school buses. Now all trains have to be standardised, and drivers aren’t allowed to drive just any train, only specific types they are certified to drive.
Sets of Mark 1s on Summer Saturday services to the seaside. With freight locomotives going spare at the weekend providing traction.
Happy days!
Or indeed standard long distance services on summar Saturdays. I used to keep an eye open, wait for the relief, and hop in the relief after everyone else had piled into the first. Often lots of space - even a compartment (the old kind) to myself from Newcastle northwards. And fresh summer air in the windows.
Lincoln continues to have the highest rate of cases of Covid-19 of any local authority area in England, according to the most recent published data. The city reported 617 new cases in the seven days to 6 August – the equivalent of 621.4 per 100,000 people. That was down from 716.0 per 100,000 in the seven days to 30 July.
Of the 315 local areas in England, 187 (59%) have seen a week-on-week rise in rates, 126 (40%) have seen a fall and two are unchanged, according to a list calculated by the PA news agency, based on data published by Public Health England today.
The figures are based on the number of people who have tested positive for Covid-19 in either a lab-reported or rapid lateral flow test, by specimen date. Data for the most recent four days (7-10 August) has been excluded as it is incomplete and does not reflect the true number of cases.
Exeter had the second highest rate, up from 541.1 to 601.2, with 790 new cases. Hull had the third highest rate, up from 512.7 to 580.1, with 1,507 new cases.
The five areas with the biggest week-on-week rises were:
Peterborough (up from 301.1 to 441.0) Oadby and Wigston (249.1 to 384.1) Hinckley and Bosworth (272.2 to 394.2) Derby (235.1 to 338.1) Cambridge (322.1 to 423.1)
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
The story that Cameron waved his willy at a pig's head in a Piers Gaveston society ritual.
Yes, I get it now.
Of course, it was put forward by Oakeshott and Cashcroft, who are both totally untrustworthy.
And denied by Cameron who is... It does sound implausible but so does Cameron joining the Bullingdon. Tbh I doubt most voters would care about pissed-up posh student antics. All but one of the last Tory leadership candidates admitted drug use and no-one cared, except in Gove's case for the hypocrisy in sacking teachers for the same thing.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
ScottXP could present a five minute segment of a round up of the best posts on twitter.
Hugely excited to be able to announce my brand new show on @GBNews!
Congratulations, Francis!
LOL, They couldn't afford me.
Perhaps not. But I’d watch at least one episode.
We should pull together a PB a show for GB news.
TSE - fashion tips Max - latest vaccine news Malmesbury - latest plague numbers Justin - random historical parallels Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today CHB - rebuttal from Labour MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone Eek and JJessop on computer coding Driving with Dura Ace And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
Would have the nerve and composure to do your puns in front of a TV audience though?
Maybe after the GB news slot you could move and find out.
'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.
Catamite is what he meant. You obviously got an F in your history of Boris exam. Piers Gaveston, for it was he, is the only man to have screwed over two successive Eton and Oxford Prime Ministers.
When did Piers Gaveston screw David Cameron?
The story that Cameron waved his willy at a pig's head in a Piers Gaveston society ritual.
Yes, I get it now.
Of course, it was put forward by Oakeshott and Cashcroft, who are both totally untrustworthy.
Isabel?
Yes.
My boss hates David Cameron before it was fashionable and he's also a graduate of the University of Oxford, the morning after the Cameron pig story came out he said it was utter bollocks.
He said the Piers Gaveston Society is made up of oiks who think they are aristos and there's no way anyone would be a member of the Bullingdon and the PG Society and Dave was clearly Bullingdon material from the day he was born.
Comments
But I’d watch at least one episode.
Boris Johnson was sacked from his job at The Times newspaper over allegations he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace.
“The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed.
Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-lies-conservative-leader-candidate-list-times-banana-brexit-bus-a8929076.html
Johnson was fired from his first job, at The Times of London, for making up a quote about Edward II's catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-telegraph-times-journalist-thatcher-tory-leadership-churchill-a9014196.html
India will eventually win the gold a the Olympics and it'll start their obsession with the Olympics the way winning the 1983 world cup did for one day cricket and the 2007 T20 world cup with T20 cricket.
Though some mix of the two working together could succeed
You have to be careful about 'driverless' when it comes to trains. Many London Underground lines are automated; all the 'driver' usually does is check the doors are safe to open and close, then start the train. Unless you have platform doors and other systems, you still need a DLR-style 'train captain' on board to fulfil that role.
Tube train drivers have to be one of the best-paid, least-work jobs there is. £55k a year. But even that saving, amongst all the drivers, does not make up for the cost of retrofitting the network to allow true driverless trains.
AMC, the US cinema chain that owns Odeon, says it will allow customers to pay for movie tickets and concessions in Bitcoin by the end of the year.
Boss Adam Aron said it has been exploring the technology and "how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe".
The firm, which is the largest US cinema chain, has not said whether it will apply to its cinemas in Europe.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58163914
Because there is no other reasonable explanation.
No, for me the single most heinous thing the British ever did in Indian Subcontinent was teaching the locals the utter snooze-fest that is Cricket! If they taught the Indians and Pakistanis how to play football, by contrast, India could have by now become the Brazil of Asia, and perhaps modern Pakistan might play the part of Argentina!
Most of the Underground could now be driverless if it wasn’t for the unions. AIUI they’re on £55k basic, plus extensive bonuses and overtime, and the jobs are only ever available to internal candidates who have done their ‘duty’ in getting to the line.
In addition:
1) I frequently see 'Beeching Cuts!' blamed for lines that closed well before his report, or for lines (e.g. Matlock to Buxton) that were not in his report. Likewise, some lines that he said should be close, were kept open for political reasons - e.g. the mid-Wales line.
2) Beeching did not close a single inch of railway line. The politicians did. They could have ignored his report, as Thatcher did the Serpell Report in ?1982?.
A small part of Khan's vote fragmented around the large field of also-rans, again perhaps because of the media narrative of an easy re-election win.
The 2018 results were very good for Labour - they outpolled the Conservatives 44-29 across London, won double the number of Council seats and pushed the Conservatives down to just over 500, a worse result than 1994 which was pretty disastrous nationally.
Looking at the Boroughs, can we see Labour gaining places Barnet and Wandsworth this time? I'm not convinced.
TSE - fashion tips
Max - latest vaccine news
Malmesbury - latest plague numbers
Justin - random historical parallels
Hyufd - polls and whatever the fuck CCO have said today
CHB - rebuttal from Labour
MalcolmG - to give the view from Scotland, which is that they hate everyone
Eek and JJessop on computer coding
Driving with Dura Ace
And finally a stand up section with some awesome puns from me.
As do Nick Gibb, Amanda Spielman, Sean Harford and Simon Lebus.
There just is no way they can regain the confidence of anyone involved in education, and that’s not just teachers, it’s parents and students as well.
That applied to both the ‘pure’ network he put forward and the one for reduced subsidy.
Big G, exculpating Tory governments ancient and modern, blaming every ill of today on Drakeford and Sturgeon.
But: 'Successive'?
And Beibherli C could come in after TSE and talk about Ireland and shoes.
Conversation
Poly Network
@PolyNetwork2
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Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses:
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$600m missing. How many cinema tickets is that?
Any clues for the interested?
CDU/CSU 25.5%
SPD 17.5%
Green 17.5%
FDP 12.5%
AfD 11.5%
Left 6.5%
Free Voters 3.5%
Others 5.5%
https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/
Of course, it was put forward by Oakeshott and Cashcroft, who are both totally untrustworthy.
The 'mix of the two working together' on the East Coast franchise seems to be: private enterprise fails miserably before the state picks up the pieces... rinse and repeat.
https://inews.co.uk/news/carrie-symonds-boris-johnson-girlfriend-claims-abused-expenses-working-tory-spin-doctor-312537
and
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7230155/Boris-Johnsons-girlfriend-Carrie-Symonds-quit-job-Conservative-Party-expenses-claims.html
But there should be no place for such shallowness at the top of Government. Johnson really does lack substance. He's pathetic.
Infrequent, slow, unreliable, with poor connections, and often unclean.
That's one of the reasons why he closed so much - BR just idled through dire services on far too many lines through the 1940s and 50s.
And of course Sturgeon and Drakeford have their moments but they are far from the perfection you idolise
LNER have managed to suck more than Virgin East Coast.
I think they have 40% satisfaction rating with Which!
The ‘market’ banned by the FCA a couple of months ago…
Jeez. Who trusts these people with $600m?
They seem incredibly well matched in that case.
Happy days!
Secondly, I must say the figures I've seen disagree with yours quite markedly, particularly once pollution/other indirect costs of road transport are factored in. It certainly depends how you measure it and what you count as a cost of roads/driving, but there are serious studies/reports making this argument. For a good collection of them, albeit on a rather dated and ranty website, see this page below.
https://ipayroadtax.com/no-such-thing-as-road-tax/when-will-drivers-start-paying-the-full-costs-of-motoring/
Also, some of his thinking was muddled. One of his irritations was not closing the ECML because the route to Scotland was "duplicated" by the WCML, and he didn't see cutting off Berwick upon Tweed as a big deal. And he was still unrepentant in the 1980s, almost 20 years later.
He went for an enthusiastic interpretation of his brief and took it too far.
Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, Pollard told MPs, since the vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid. Therefore reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population is “mythical”, although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, he said.
Cuomo resigns.
A 33% return in 2 days.
Of the 315 local areas in England, 187 (59%) have seen a week-on-week rise in rates, 126 (40%) have seen a fall and two are unchanged, according to a list calculated by the PA news agency, based on data published by Public Health England today.
The figures are based on the number of people who have tested positive for Covid-19 in either a lab-reported or rapid lateral flow test, by specimen date. Data for the most recent four days (7-10 August) has been excluded as it is incomplete and does not reflect the true number of cases.
Exeter had the second highest rate, up from 541.1 to 601.2, with 790 new cases. Hull had the third highest rate, up from 512.7 to 580.1, with 1,507 new cases.
The five areas with the biggest week-on-week rises were:
Peterborough (up from 301.1 to 441.0)
Oadby and Wigston (249.1 to 384.1)
Hinckley and Bosworth (272.2 to 394.2)
Derby (235.1 to 338.1)
Cambridge (322.1 to 423.1)
Maybe after the GB news slot you could move and find out.
My boss hates David Cameron before it was fashionable and he's also a graduate of the University of Oxford, the morning after the Cameron pig story came out he said it was utter bollocks.
He said the Piers Gaveston Society is made up of oiks who think they are aristos and there's no way anyone would be a member of the Bullingdon and the PG Society and Dave was clearly Bullingdon material from the day he was born.