I was told my posts were ill-informed the other day, how about all the thread headers about the gap in the polls closing, SKS could be next PM, SKS is fantastic, Boris is in trouble etc etc.
10 points clear at this stage of the electoral cycle is nuts, if polls like this continue over the next month then SKS will be in trouble at the Labour Conference.
Yes - but I very much doubt that's what we're seeing (yet) in this poll.....
The Green Coalition does seem like an unforced error (from my London-centric perspective). What does the SNP get from it? They are completely dominant in Holyrood and can still push for indyref whenever they like (and be thwarted by Boris and the courts)
Now they are tied to a much less popular party with some seriously contentious policies, at a time when more centrist/rightwing Scots are already unhappy at SNP Wokery
Am I missing something? Probably I am. Scots politics is so murky
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
I wonder when my street will get an opinion on this? And who interprets what the various roads believe?
Perhaps it would be better re-written as "Boris Johnson does not care whether he broke the rules or not and no-one else can do anything about it anyway".
The tweet is misleading.
Johnson flew to Middlesbrough on his official plane for government business which he then concluded.
He was then driven to Hartlepool.
Labour say that is "joint" public/party business. However CCHQ will tell you - and I think they are right - that the fact that he went on to Hartlepool does not change the character or need for this flight. They are two separate occurances.
There is a small asterisk as to how CCHQ could have spent literally nothing on transport for the campaign - but the plane is what Labour want to focus on.
I know Labour are not great at winning elections but are CCHQ and Downing Street now interchangeable? Even then could we have the person at CCHQ who has investigated the claim and made a decision named, otherwise there can be no accountability.
And the idea that anyone at Downing Street is objectively scrutinising the PMs adherence to the ministerial code is laughable. Downing St = Boris Johnson. Ministerial code = irrelevant relic of the past.
My commentary is independent of the merits of this specific instance.
From a philosophical perspective it’s concerning to have an appointed committee/individual who can censure the PM though. He’s the most senior elected representative in the country and he’s accountable to the electorate.
Have Mr Civil Servant fining him or suspending him or whatever seems inappropriate.
If thats what the PM wants to do, he should say that and own it.
Not put out a press release saying "Downing St" has cleared him.
That’s a different point. I’m arguing that applying the “ministerial code” to the PM is pointless because it has to be the PM who has the final say.
In this case though - based on someone’s post earlier about Middlesbrough - it seems that the Tories were cute but within the rules
That is not a different point, that was pretty much the main point of my first post!
The difference seems to be that I am saying it is wrong for the PM to pretend he has been cleared of breaking the ministerial code when the judge, "Downing St", is presumably himself. He does not care, because he is above the rules and knows it. He does not want the public to understand that though.
I agree. It’s a fairly obvious point though. He is right though in that he has been cleared of the breach.
I responded that because of your point having the PM subject to the Ministerial Code was meaningless… you just reiterated your position
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Maybe the public are not on twitter nor may I suggest this excellent forum
And maybe Labour overplayed the Raab story
The Raab story was always puffed up nonsense. MINISTER DOES NOT MAKE PHONE CALL WHILE ON HOLIDAY
No one gives a fuck, apart from frantic Remoaners and the Daily Mail. Also it was entirely overshadowed by the horror of Kabul - which IS an enormous story - I've had non-political friends mention it unprompted. They are angry at Biden
The Afghani story has cut through like few others, but it's probably neutral in UK terms
maybe??!?
yeah, for all the possible government issues, it's (actually unrelated) efforts by people in Kabul that are cutting through. The ambassador staying behind (when it looked like it might really kick off). The Paras on the gates.
Oh, and Biden's weaknesses, poor decisions and poor media showings going front and centre.
Can someone explain why, when we have a chronic labour shortage, the government is still paying a couple of million people to sit on their arses with the furlough scheme?
The people still on furlough can't realistically still have a job if they still aren't needed when everything is open and things like hospitality are under manned she-personned.
I know restaurant and hotel owners who can't get their furloughed staff back, because the staff took the furlough money and went to work for other people on the sly, and the staff have found they prefer the new job
We have probably wasted many billions in fraud
Reminds me of the way that whenever there's a tube strike a lot of people discover the route they've been using for years isn't the best one.
They find walking is better?
Sometimes, but usually they find a different combination of tube line journeys is better than the one they've been using.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
Yes - but I very much doubt that's what we're seeing (yet) in this poll.....
The Green Coalition does seem like an unforced error (from my London-centric perspective). What does the SNP get from it? They are completely dominant in Holyrood and can still push for indyref whenever they like (and be thwarted by Boris and the courts)
Now they are tied to a much less popular party with some seriously contentious policies, at a time when more centrist/rightwing Scots are already unhappy at SNP Wokery
Am I missing something? Probably I am. Scots politics is so murky
If that NE sub-sample holds and is accurate - several more Labour seats in danger, including, believe it or not, at least 2 of the Sunderlands! However, to be sensible, they are just that - sub-samples. Still, I still dream fondly of my home town Sunderland central returning to the blue fold for the first time since 1963!
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating stands at -18%, a 4% decrease from last week and the lowest net approval rating for Starmer to date. 41% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 3%), while 23% approve (down 1%). Meanwhile, 30% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
I expect Mr Dickson will be all over that subsample like a cheap suit....
So Boris has got a meaty Afghan bounce? I'd never have predicted that. Surely that's Sir Keir's leadership done for. Labour supporters must be feeling like Morrisey tonight:
And I know it's over - still I cling I don't know where else I can go Over and over and over and over Over and over, la... … I know it's over And it never really began But in my heart it was so real
Labour almost, almost lulled the red wall into starting to think about coming back....
Then Afghanistan happened, and labour started talking about refugee numbers.
I expect Mr Dickson will be all over that subsample like a cheap suit....
Margin of Error.
These ramped polls are never interesting.
It's a weekly poll so its unfair to call it "ramped" - that's usually done my the monthly Sundays.
It was ramped here earlier today.
The polling company is hardly responsible for over-enthusiastic PB-ers.....
It was ramped on Twitter which was quoted here.
This poll ramping should always be ignored. Same here.
my all-time favourite was someone ramping a 'dead even' poll in the run up to the 2010 election. Literally a whole thread on it, with all the repetitive nonsense you would expect and all the what ifs yes buts and maybes.
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
I remember that place from 30 years ago! I tried to get in, but they wouldn't let me. For some reason ...
(Scruffy student)
It must have closed fairly recently. The Google Streetview from Oct 2020 shows it as shut. However, until a few years ago I used to go past it almost daily on the run part of my commute into Hammersmith when it was very much still open. It was always nice to see what beautiful vehicles they had in there.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
I expect Mr Dickson will be all over that subsample like a cheap suit....
Margin of Error.
These ramped polls are never interesting.
It's a weekly poll so its unfair to call it "ramped" - that's usually done my the monthly Sundays.
It was ramped here earlier today.
The polling company is hardly responsible for over-enthusiastic PB-ers.....
It was ramped on Twitter which was quoted here.
This poll ramping should always be ignored. Same here.
my all-time favourite was someone ramping a 'dead even' poll in the run up to the 2010 election. Literally a whole thread on it, with all the repetitive nonsense you would expect and all the what ifs yes buts and maybes.
There was no such poll.
Was that the one that had Lib Dems taking Witney? Turned out to be a complete Twitter fake.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating stands at -18%, a 4% decrease from last week and the lowest net approval rating for Starmer to date. 41% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 3%), while 23% approve (down 1%). Meanwhile, 30% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
Karma is giving Labour a good length of time to reflect on why it broke its promise to introduce a fairer voting system, when it had the chance.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
…and under a straight binary referendum it’s Leave, and under whatever system the Euro Elections use it’s The Brexit Party or UKIP
What we need is a voting system that stops us voting to leave the EU and the Conservatives or Farage from keeping on winning…
Only graduates get to vote? Only London votes count?
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
I'm struggling to see the nightmare.
We should all hail David Cameron for sacrificing his own career to end the schism on the Tory/Brexiteer right.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
If the Brexit vote - all 52% of it - were to stay with the Tories, no amount of tactical voting could defeat it. Tactical voting isn't the answer. Providing a more appealing offer is.
The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had a simple message for Americans contemplating using ivermectin, a medicine used to deworm livestock, instead of getting a Covid shot.
“You are not a horse,” it said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
As with other purported alternative treatments for Covid-19, misinformation about ivermectin has spread on social media and through rightwing media and politicians.
Side-effects that could be associated with ivermectin, it said, included “skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events (dizziness, seizures, confusion), sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalisation, and liver injury (hepatitis).”
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
If the Brexit vote - all 52% of it - were to stay with the Tories, no amount of tactical voting could defeat it. Tactical voting isn't the answer. Providing a more appealing offer is.
Yes - unfortunately the 'remain/rejoin' legacy is so painfully clear both above and just below the surface it is not likely something we will see. That anguished facial expression of SKS is there for a reason.
Keir Starmer’s net approval rating stands at -18%, a 4% decrease from last week and the lowest net approval rating for Starmer to date. 41% disapprove of Keir Starmer’s job performance (up 3%), while 23% approve (down 1%). Meanwhile, 30% neither approve nor disapprove of Starmer’s job performance (down 1%).
Yes - but I very much doubt that's what we're seeing (yet) in this poll.....
Great poll for the Tories and poor poll for Labour with a 10% Tory lead.
Bad poll for the SNP too, 33% would be their worst general election performance in Scotland since 2010
They’re only sub samples but the strength for the LibDems in the SW appears encouraging.
Look at the size of the majorities over the LibDems in the SW. Their targets last time - Cornwall North, Devon North - they need monumental swings to be in play. And from the Conservatives at that.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
Karma is giving Labour a good length of time to reflect on why it broke its promise to introduce a fairer voting system, when it had the chance.
It is also giving Sir Kir Royale Starmer tine to reflect that maybe, just maybe, pushing for a second EU referendum before enacting the result of the first was not a stellar idea
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
The fundamental problem for Labour is they can't win over the voters they need to win an election without upsetting their activists and core vote. It's a catch-22 situation for the party.
@dgurdasani1 Just wanted to drop in quickly to say I'm away on leave this week, so won't be able to respond to messages, notifications or do media, but will do after I'm back next week.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
Karma is giving Labour a good length of time to reflect on why it broke its promise to introduce a fairer voting system, when it had the chance.
It is also giving Sir Kir Royale Starmer tine to reflect that maybe, just maybe, pushing for a second EU referendum before enacting the result of the first was not a stellar idea
So how was the poll conducted? "Assuming you'll be given £1000 today if you vote Conservative, how do you intend to vote?"...
"Assuming Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party..."
It's taken the Conservatives thirty years to get over Thatcher's legacy - and even then, it's still there for the ardent leftist. It might take Labour a decade to get over Corbyn's poisonous legacy for his party.
That's either a dosing interval thing or a sign that AZ is much, much better than it's given credit for.
I think its both. I think the dosing interval made sense, and people who were against it because the trial was only 3 weeks and thought it a gamble, are shown to wrong now. I also think AZ is a great vaccine, that builds immunity slower, but potentially lasts better too. Maybe more like the natural post infection immunity.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
Boris has had Brexit, covid and now Afghanistan on his watch
I am certain no previous PM would have wanted that cocktail of events
If he comes through all of them ?????
He’s been so lucky in getting so many chances to rise to the challenge of becoming a second Churchill, inspiring and uniting the country in the face of such crises, yet has dismally failed every single one of them. Karma indeed.
Whether you agree with it or not, the UK's policy response to the Afghan refugee crisis has been prompt and clear.
We know the numbers, identity (ie mostly women and children) and timescale of the refugees we are taking. Attempts to shame or bully the government into higher numbers have been firmly resisted.
I reckon voters in the key seats probably like this. Patel hired Conhome's Jonathan Isaby recently and has undoubtedly smartened up her act. Not such a pushover, now.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
I thought a lot of the benefit was that more capacity unlocks significant scheduling benefits by allowing segregation of freight and passenger traffic?
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
At first I thought you meant the island of GB, trying to imagine just how that would be possible in 24 hours. I should get another cup of coffee.
If I had meant North Island, I would have said so
Sadly he’ll be swimming past here in the small hours so I won’t see him go by
Do you know if there are helpful tides? I.e. there is a best time to try this?
I’m not an expert. But it was full moon yesterday - which I suspect he’s aligning with more for the light than the tides. The tides here are peculiar - much of the island gets a double high tide because of the currents - and I’d assume that the timing and location of his departure has been chosen with tidal currents in mind. Particularly in getting past the western part of the Solent where it narrows and the tidal currents are particularly strong.
We often talk on here about the cost of infrastructure projects. Our village/town is being extended, and as part of this, a new water main is being dug. This afternoon the Little 'Un and I went for a jog up towards the school, where the water main crosses the path. There are a few mains power cables buried here - four or five, half an inch or so in diameter, probably providing power to the streetlights along the path.
Thirty years ago, when I did a little work in my dad's business, we would have dug carefully by hand around the cables, even if they could not be switched off. Today, they had a lorry with a big suction rig, eight or ten inches in diameter, that sucked up the earth from around and below the cables to avoid shovels in the ground around them.
Instead of two or three men with shovels, this requires a complex and expensive piece of plant, that probably has to be booked in advance. It is marginally safer for the workers, but probably increases the expense of the works by an order of magnitude, and adds complexity to the planning and operation.
I'm not saying this new way of operating is wrong; just that it's more complex and expensive.
As PB loves anecdata, my latest Waitrose trip. Seemed a significant increase in those not wearing masks. May have been a monday PM effect (always a quiet time) but was close to 50%, not the normal 10%. And the shortages are in. I couldn't get my wife's Raisin Wheats. Had to make do with the own brand version. There will probably be a divorce petition...
@dgurdasani1 Just wanted to drop in quickly to say I'm away on leave this week, so won't be able to respond to messages, notifications or do media, but will do after I'm back next week.
Maybe one of us could fill in for her? Rotate round a list of tweets: 1) 100,000 cases by tomorrow 2) Why aren't we vaccinating the children? 3) Long covid effects 3 in every 1 person who gets covid and so far has been shown to last 1000 years - why aren't we vaccinating the children?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
I thought a lot of the benefit was that more capacity unlocks significant scheduling benefits by allowing segregation of freight and passenger traffic?
Yes, but it is still a side-effect for freight. Freight (and stopping passenger services) go at slower speed, and therefore delay express services. By segregating much of the express traffic on a new route, there are less conflicts between slow and fast traffic, and therefore more paths.
Right now there’s a guy swimming around the island, attempting to become only the fifth person to do so and to break the record by doing it within 24 hours.
At first I thought you meant the island of GB, trying to imagine just how that would be possible in 24 hours. I should get another cup of coffee.
If I had meant North Island, I would have said so
Sadly he’ll be swimming past here in the small hours so I won’t see him go by
Do you know if there are helpful tides? I.e. there is a best time to try this?
I’m not an expert. But it was full moon yesterday - which I suspect he’s aligning with more for the light than the tides. The tides here are peculiar - much of the island gets a double high tide because of the currents - and I’d assume that the timing and location of his departure has been chosen with tidal currents in mind. Particularly in getting past the western part of the Solent where it narrows and the tidal currents are particularly strong.
Yeah - I was vaguely aware of the wierd double tides and wondered if there is a 'best time' to try it.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
If the Brexit vote - all 52% of it - were to stay with the Tories, no amount of tactical voting could defeat it. Tactical voting isn't the answer. Providing a more appealing offer is.
I don't mean all just most of it. Add in your Remainer or Brexitnostic types who are nevertheless firm Cons - think Felix, Big G, HYUFD, these sorts of stubborn philosophies - and that's your 40 odd. Yes, a better offer will help, course it will, but on top of that there HAS to be some smart and extensive tactical anti-Con voting. If not it's curtains. Our future is more Johnson. Lots more.
In a tremendous GE for Anas* I could see him taking a 5% swing from the SNP. That would net them four seats (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, East Lothian, Glasgow North East and Rutherglen and Hamilton West). That shortfall means he needs to take an extra thirteen seats in England or Wales.
(*very hard to see happening on his current form)
Is he still in office, totally missing for at least a month.
In fairness, any SLab leader would struggle to get attention just now. As third party they are down the pecking order. If polls start to consistently put them in a clear second place then they will get better coverage, especially from BBC.
But another key problem remains: Anas is so boring, and his party have absolutely nothing to say.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
On the basis that most of the tram users are commuting 5 days a week, that's about 13-15% of the population. Hardly anything to write home about for a city centre system.
The thing is that public transport only really works in high population density areas. The thinner spread the population, the less chance there is for this sort of thing to be economically viable. At the same time, the lower the population density, the better roads and car work.
There is a reason why a Bakewell, Haversage and Castleton metro system hasn't been proposed.
Planners tend to have a SE mentality, where all land is either golf courses claiming to be greenbelt or built up at the highest density possible. Also, almost everyone works in one central place - London - so you can just make most rail routes roughtly radial from the centre(ish).
Lots of the North simply isn't like this - and there is very little enthusiasm (except in the planning departments) for turning it all into Bexleyheath on Derwent.
Apart from anything else, rail is just too expensive. About 15 years ago, I lived in Stockport, 2 minutes from the station. I worked in Macclesfield, the next stop by fast train (about 7 mins) or about 4 stops by slow train (about 20 mins). In Macclesfield, I had a 15 minute walk to work. The problem was that the tickets (about £7 a day back then), were so expensive it was cheaper to drive my 1970s diesel Landrover (fuel consumption about 25mpg). It was also on average as fast or faster door to door once you learnt the optimal route, and being a landrover you only got a bit wet when it rained, rather than completely soaked walking across town.
That was about as optimal a scenario as its possible to get - and it simply wasn't good enough. I doubt its any cheaper by train now, and these days I've car that does 50mpg+ and doesn't let the rain in.
The reality is for large chunks of the North, driving is the most viable option - so we should be looking to facilitate that, rather than building expensive railways which don't actually go where people to go anyway.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
I'm struggling to see the nightmare.
We should all hail David Cameron for sacrificing his own career to end the schism on the Tory/Brexiteer right.
...but the schism is still very much there, except those who are in denial. Many of us who are centre right and didn't want Brexit, or thought it pointless have accepted that it has happened. It doesn't mean that we are reconciled to the incompetent buffoon who is currently PM, and will be voting Tory any time soon. When Johnson goes or is removed then I might consider returning to the fold. Not until. His pathetic display in parliament the other day, and the obvious disdain that foreign leaders have for him only further entrenches my view of him. He is unfit for office.
Boris has had Brexit, covid and now Afghanistan on his watch
I am certain no previous PM would have wanted that cocktail of events
If he comes through all of them ?????
He’s been so lucky in getting so many chances to rise to the challenge of becoming a second Churchill, inspiring and uniting the country in the face of such crises, yet has dismally failed every single one of them. Karma indeed.
Incidentally, I wonder if we will see any changes in traffic numbers, congestion, pollution etc from the 50% reduction of "land bridge" commercial traffic from the ROI which has allegedly now been diverted through southern ports in Ireland.
I think reducing traffic is in general a more sensible way of dealing with congestion than building more roads willy-nilly.
This is actually a huge Brexit win which the remainers were trying to spin as some sort of disaster. Its a bit rough on those owning truckers cafes in Holyhead, but the country was getting very little out of it other than costs and pollution and congestion - all the benefits went to RoI haulers.
The same, or similar, goes for France, Germany and Spain, though they seem to be doing a better job than the UK of getting cases down again.
The odd thing about that graph is the absence of any sign of the generally (and not unreasonably) assumed lag between the various indicators?
It says near the bottom in the hard-to-read text that they have been offset by 6 and 14 days.
Well spotted. I am pleased my talent for spotting crap data is still firing on all cylinders, as without the offset that data would have been most peculiar.
Yes - but I very much doubt that's what we're seeing (yet) in this poll.....
Great poll for the Tories and poor poll for Labour with a 10% Tory lead.
Bad poll for the SNP too, 33% would be their worst general election performance in Scotland since 2010
Some of those figures look implausible to me. I can't believe that the Tories are behind in the East Midlands; nor that Labour is so far behind in the North East; nor that Labour is so far ahead in Yorkshire/Humber.
Boris has had Brexit, covid and now Afghanistan on his watch
I am certain no previous PM would have wanted that cocktail of events
If he comes through all of them ?????
He’s been so lucky in getting so many chances to rise to the challenge of becoming a second Churchill, inspiring and uniting the country in the face of such crises, yet has dismally failed every single one of them. Karma indeed.
None of them are over yet
Time will tell
It would be a miracle if the clown were able to pull any last minute world king triumph from any of them, having so dismally flunked every test he’s been given so far.
You’re letting your Tory membership lapse imminently, remember?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Yes - but I very much doubt that's what we're seeing (yet) in this poll.....
Great poll for the Tories and poor poll for Labour with a 10% Tory lead.
Bad poll for the SNP too, 33% would be their worst general election performance in Scotland since 2010
Some of those figures look implausible to me. I can't believe that the Tories are behind in the East Midlands; nor that Labour is so far behind in the North East; nor that Labour is so far ahead in Yorkshire/Humber.
This is getting to the point where I have to ask what the **** is going on with the polling.
Its fairly straightforward isnt it? Tories are stuck on 40-44 range, which is the bulk of the Brexit vote. Labour vs minor parties a bit more unpredictable but still fairly steady. Until about a quarter or more Brexiteers think Brexit is either a failure or in the past, the Tories are in a very healthy polling scenario, regardless of their performance on anything else.
This is the nightmare scenario. The Brexit vote stays with the Tories and Remainers neither unite under Labour nor vote tactically enough to combat this. Upshot under FPTP is Con majority government.
…and under a straight binary referendum it’s Leave, and under whatever system the Euro Elections use it’s The Brexit Party or UKIP
What we need is a voting system that stops us voting to leave the EU and the Conservatives or Farage from keeping on winning…
Only graduates get to vote? Only London votes count?
None of that is required. We simply need the electorate to stop being such mugs. Which they will. I trust them implicitly. They didn't get to be the electorate for nothing. My only concern is how long it will take. Ideally, I'd like to live to see it.
Comments
10 points clear at this stage of the electoral cycle is nuts, if polls like this continue over the next month then SKS will be in trouble at the Labour Conference.
Now they are tied to a much less popular party with some seriously contentious policies, at a time when more centrist/rightwing Scots are already unhappy at SNP Wokery
Am I missing something? Probably I am. Scots politics is so murky
I responded that because of your point having the PM subject to the Ministerial Code was meaningless… you just reiterated your position
yeah, for all the possible government issues, it's (actually unrelated) efforts by people in Kabul that are cutting through. The ambassador staying behind (when it looked like it might really kick off). The Paras on the gates.
Oh, and Biden's weaknesses, poor decisions and poor media showings going front and centre.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
This poll ramping should always be ignored. Same here.
https://onthewight.com/oly-rush-begins-his-world-record-attempt-swimming-around-the-isle-of-wight/
A notable difference between Israel and UK in their Delta waves https://ft.com/content/23cdbf8c-b5ef-4596-bb46-f510606ab556 by @jburnmurdoch and @nikasgarib @FT
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1429835698765324289?s=20
Bad poll for the SNP too, 33% would be their worst general election performance in Scotland since 2010
needs more clever slogans like burner phone government. that will work.
Then Afghanistan happened, and labour started talking about refugee numbers.
Oh dear. A bit like 19-year olds at a free bar.
Too late now.
There was no such poll.
I've offset the admissions and deaths numbers (6 and 14 days respectively) to make the main point more clearly.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1429793104698253316?s=20
Sadly he’ll be swimming past here in the small hours so I won’t see him go by
Smithson's Office of Regulations and Enforcement.
For days afterwards it was all you could hear on the streets of Camden.
"Burner phone government!"
"You know what this government is - burner phone government!"
"When I think about this government, I have one terrible image in my mind which sums them up - BURNER PHONES"
It became a kind of national mantra, millions saying it every few minutes
What we need is a voting system that stops us voting to leave the EU and the Conservatives or Farage from keeping on winning…
Only graduates get to vote?
Only London votes count?
They say Ken High Street.
We should all hail David Cameron for sacrificing his own career to end the schism on the Tory/Brexiteer right.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
Tactical voting isn't the answer. Providing a more appealing offer is.
“You are not a horse,” it said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
As with other purported alternative treatments for Covid-19, misinformation about ivermectin has spread on social media and through rightwing media and politicians.
Side-effects that could be associated with ivermectin, it said, included “skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events (dizziness, seizures, confusion), sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalisation, and liver injury (hepatitis).”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/23/not-pretty-marble-arch-mound-draws-crowds-keen-to-see-how-bad-it-is
The ex LD SW seats which voted Leave, which is virtually all of them bar Bath and Cheltenham, would stay Tory
Lib 33.1%
Con 32.2%
NDP 19.1%
BQ 5.8%
People's 4.5%
Greens 4.3%
Others 0.9%
Changes since 2019 general election:
Lib nc
Con -2.1%
NDP +3.1%
BQ -1.8%
People's +2.9%
Greens -2.2%
Others nc
I am certain no previous PM would have wanted that cocktail of events
If he comes through all of them ?????
@dgurdasani1
Just wanted to drop in quickly to say I'm away on leave this week, so won't be able to respond to messages, notifications or do media, but will do after I'm back next week.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
Really vaccines have nothing on ... a more transmissible and virulent variant??
Even if the Conservatives won a plurality again they would need about 36% of the vote to win most seats
It's taken the Conservatives thirty years to get over Thatcher's legacy - and even then, it's still there for the ardent leftist. It might take Labour a decade to get over Corbyn's poisonous legacy for his party.
* Ok not everyone, but a lot who don't like the current government or brexit or both...
Same point to Mr Mark upthread.
Of course the number of positive tests is not the same as the number of infections!
We know the numbers, identity (ie mostly women and children) and timescale of the refugees we are taking. Attempts to shame or bully the government into higher numbers have been firmly resisted.
I reckon voters in the key seats probably like this. Patel hired Conhome's Jonathan Isaby recently and has undoubtedly smartened up her act. Not such a pushover, now.
We often talk on here about the cost of infrastructure projects. Our village/town is being extended, and as part of this, a new water main is being dug. This afternoon the Little 'Un and I went for a jog up towards the school, where the water main crosses the path. There are a few mains power cables buried here - four or five, half an inch or so in diameter, probably providing power to the streetlights along the path.
Thirty years ago, when I did a little work in my dad's business, we would have dug carefully by hand around the cables, even if they could not be switched off. Today, they had a lorry with a big suction rig, eight or ten inches in diameter, that sucked up the earth from around and below the cables to avoid shovels in the ground around them.
Instead of two or three men with shovels, this requires a complex and expensive piece of plant, that probably has to be booked in advance. It is marginally safer for the workers, but probably increases the expense of the works by an order of magnitude, and adds complexity to the planning and operation.
I'm not saying this new way of operating is wrong; just that it's more complex and expensive.
And the shortages are in. I couldn't get my wife's Raisin Wheats. Had to make do with the own brand version. There will probably be a divorce petition...
1) 100,000 cases by tomorrow
2) Why aren't we vaccinating the children?
3) Long covid effects 3 in every 1 person who gets covid and so far has been shown to last 1000 years - why aren't we vaccinating the children?
However, it is the first poll since so more data needed but it is a fair question, especially as the SNP did not need to do it
But another key problem remains: Anas is so boring, and his party have absolutely nothing to say.
The thing is that public transport only really works in high population density areas. The thinner spread the population, the less chance there is for this sort of thing to be economically viable. At the same time, the lower the population density, the better roads and car work.
There is a reason why a Bakewell, Haversage and Castleton metro system hasn't been proposed.
Planners tend to have a SE mentality, where all land is either golf courses claiming to be greenbelt or built up at the highest density possible. Also, almost everyone works in one central place - London - so you can just make most rail routes roughtly radial from the centre(ish).
Lots of the North simply isn't like this - and there is very little enthusiasm (except in the planning departments) for turning it all into Bexleyheath on Derwent.
Apart from anything else, rail is just too expensive. About 15 years ago, I lived in Stockport, 2 minutes from the station. I worked in Macclesfield, the next stop by fast train (about 7 mins) or about 4 stops by slow train (about 20 mins). In Macclesfield, I had a 15 minute walk to work.
The problem was that the tickets (about £7 a day back then), were so expensive it was cheaper to drive my 1970s diesel Landrover (fuel consumption about 25mpg). It was also on average as fast or faster door to door once you learnt the optimal route, and being a landrover you only got a bit wet when it rained, rather than completely soaked walking across town.
That was about as optimal a scenario as its possible to get - and it simply wasn't good enough. I doubt its any cheaper by train now, and these days I've car that does 50mpg+ and doesn't let the rain in.
The reality is for large chunks of the North, driving is the most viable option - so we should be looking to facilitate that, rather than building expensive railways which don't actually go where people to go anyway.
If the SNP are really down to 33% everyone in Scotland will need to buy umbrellas that are able to keep out pigshit from the new aerial porcines.
Time will tell
You’re letting your Tory membership lapse imminently, remember?
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.