The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
I've got solar panels and currently get deemed export. The situation as to whether I'd HAVE to go to metered export, and whether that'd be better for me is clear as mud. I might be better off, I have no idea but if I move over I won't be able to move back.
I've asked both the electric and the FIT company, noone seems to know or care...
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
I happens that we replaced our ch boiler two weeks ago. The new one is "hydrogen ready", i.e. able to take a 20/80 mixture with normal gas. The company producing it is having to guess the future direction of policy, and is gambling on a hydrogen mixture being the likely transition fuel as we move to zero carbon (!!).
BP in Bridgend, no queue, but no diesel. Tesco, big queue, Texaco Pencoed, big queue.
So yep, like the fanbois were saying yesterday, it's all over.
We all want it over don’t we? Tough on fuel panic tough on causes of fuel panic so Stop stoking it with these posts. Medics, doctors and nurses struggling to get fuel, meanwhile whenever people are buying something they don’t need, someone is making a killing. Think back to the wonderful bonanza for supermarkets at start of covid, and such wonderful bonanza of food waste resulted from buying more than you need.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/sector-resilience-plans Sector resilience plans set out the resilience of the UK’s most important infrastructure to the relevant risks identified in the National Risk Assessment. Produced annually, plans are placed before ministers to alert them to any perceived vulnerabilities, with a programme of measures to improve resilience where necessary....
Economic resilience takes money. The Tories have decided that bribing over 60s for their votes is the single most important national objective so I don't see where the money is going to come from.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/sector-resilience-plans Sector resilience plans set out the resilience of the UK’s most important infrastructure to the relevant risks identified in the National Risk Assessment. Produced annually, plans are placed before ministers to alert them to any perceived vulnerabilities, with a programme of measures to improve resilience where necessary....
Economic resilience takes money. The Tories have decided that bribing over 60s for their votes is the single most important national objective so I don't see where the money is going to come from.
Young workers. Who else?
Both the Lib Dems and Labour have got such a huge opportunity and they're both blowing it by banging on about fringe issues. They both need a Lynton Crosby type person to blow away the cobwebs and get them focussed on what really matters to people, not how to get Twitter likes.
1. Any party that treats the voters as stupid (i.e. Labour) deserves to be consigned to electoral oblivion.
2. The millions of voters who are panic buying unnecessarily and therefore creating a fuel shortage at the pumps are stupid morons (i.e. many PB Tories).
Both are entirely consistent and appropriate.
Speaking as a PB (ex)Tory yes the panic buying morons are morons.
And if the government said "listen morons stop being stupid" then they'd deserve to lose. They're rightly more discrete than that.
I'm not a politician so I can speak my mind. Though then people complain about politicians not being frank so they can't really win.
Philip Thompson: "I filled up on Thursday at ASDA." Also Philip Thompson: "the panic buying morons are morons"
I filled up on Thursday as my tank was empty. My light was on and by arrow was pointing below the E which is the point I always fill up. At the time I filled up only 2 of the 8 pumps were in use, including my own.
Had my tank been half-full, I wouldn't have filled up.
Those whose tanks are empty and would have filled up anyway are not the ones causing this mess.
Depends where you live. In rural Devon, 999 ambulances are taking 2 -3 hours to get to you, so, entirely undramatically, having a usable car can be life vs death. So you tend to maximal caution.
I get that. But unless you need fuel, your car is usable without being refuelled today. And if you do need fuel, you're not putting extra strain on the system.
People topping up a half-full tank that they won't be using the extra fuel for another week or two are the morons who are creating the strain and they're not life or death.
You have no idea how many are such people topping up half a tank. And it is rational as people don't know how long this situation will last.
@DavidL is operating on the assumption of it all being over by Weds. Which it may well be. But that is still a judgement call.
If it hadn't been for the very early panic buyers we might not be in this position, eh?
If only people who would be filling up anyway were doing so, then there'd be no extra demand on the system.
We had reports of stations selling more fuel in one day than they would in a week. That's not people who need the fuel urgently alone.
It is people worrying that the fuel crisis is going to escalate and they don't know when they might next be able to fill up.
Do you know when it will be resolved? Nor me.
They, and you, were and are behaving rationally.
It will be resolved in a matter of days once the pumps are refilled.
I haven't refuelled since the panic started so yes I am behaving rationally. I could join the morons and top-up my tank, but I won't because I don't need to do so.
You may not like the results. That doesn't mean the system is analogous to one that led to tens of millions of deaths and a comparable number consigned to slave labour camps.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
I happens that we replaced our ch boiler two weeks ago. The new one is "hydrogen ready", i.e. able to take a 20/80 mixture with normal gas. The company producing it is having to guess the future direction of policy, and is gambling on a hydrogen mixture being the likely transition fuel as we move to zero carbon (!!).
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
Internationally yes the next big one is France's presidential and legislative elections in the spring next year (as well as local elections in England).
Then Australia next September, Brazil in October and the US midterms in November
I believe Scotland and Wales have local elections next year too
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
My wife refuses to have one. I don't really understand why but, whatever.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
OT Regarding the German election, is there any other possible outcome beyond an SPD/Green/FDP coalition with Scholz as Chancellor?
Genuine question - I know next to nothing of German politics.
Yes, both Union-Greens-FDP, and SPD-Union are possible. SPD-Greens-FDP is by far the most likely, but it depends on the negotiations. The FDP would certainly prefer a Union-led government to an SPD led government, so are likely to drive a hard bargain (and their position is considerably strengthened by the fact that SPD-Green-Left narrowly failed to get enough for a majority).
Either way haggling between parties will determine the government, not the votes cast.
Thank goodness we have FPTP here in this country!
Coalition is unavoidable everywhere, the only question is whether you try to fit a wide range of views in one party or in many. We haven't seen the kind of political turmoil in Germany that we have seen in the UK in recent years.
And here's another thing: the voters like it. When was the last time German turnout was lower than 70%? When was the last time UK turnout was higher than 70%
The difference is that in the UK the Tories and Labour are coalitions that are formed and give a platform BEFORE the election not after it.
So voters here can make an educated decision as to which compromises have been made before they vote.
Except no, you vote for Cameron and get May, you vote for May and get Johnson, you vote for Miliband and get Corbyn, you vote for Corbyn and get Starmer. Judging by how furious everyone seems to be about their parties betraying them, the benefit you just mentioned does not manifest.
FPTP is electoral communism. It works in theory.
You vote for the party candidate here, not directly for the prime minister, we are not a presidential system
I do think at times you have a blinkered view
Most voters will vote for the leader and their party, apart from just a few who know the candidate
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
The only reason why 50% of people go to university is because Labour thought it was a great way to disguise Youth Unemployment.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
OT Regarding the German election, is there any other possible outcome beyond an SPD/Green/FDP coalition with Scholz as Chancellor?
Genuine question - I know next to nothing of German politics.
Yes, both Union-Greens-FDP, and SPD-Union are possible. SPD-Greens-FDP is by far the most likely, but it depends on the negotiations. The FDP would certainly prefer a Union-led government to an SPD led government, so are likely to drive a hard bargain (and their position is considerably strengthened by the fact that SPD-Green-Left narrowly failed to get enough for a majority).
Either way haggling between parties will determine the government, not the votes cast.
Thank goodness we have FPTP here in this country!
Coalition is unavoidable everywhere, the only question is whether you try to fit a wide range of views in one party or in many. We haven't seen the kind of political turmoil in Germany that we have seen in the UK in recent years.
And here's another thing: the voters like it. When was the last time German turnout was lower than 70%? When was the last time UK turnout was higher than 70%
The difference is that in the UK the Tories and Labour are coalitions that are formed and give a platform BEFORE the election not after it.
So voters here can make an educated decision as to which compromises have been made before they vote.
Except no, you vote for Cameron and get May, you vote for May and get Johnson, you vote for Miliband and get Corbyn, you vote for Corbyn and get Starmer. Judging by how furious everyone seems to be about their parties betraying them, the benefit you just mentioned does not manifest.
FPTP is electoral communism. It works in theory.
You vote for the party candidate here, not directly for the prime minister, we are not a presidential system
I do think at times you have a blinkered view
Most voters will vote for the leader and their party, apart from just a few who know the candidate
Yet not always, as I said Callaghan led Thatcher as preferred PM and would have likely beaten her in a presidential system even if the Conservatives still won most seats in the House of Commons in 1979.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
You may not like the results. That doesn't mean the system is analogous to one that led to tens of millions of deaths and a comparable number consigned to slave labour camps.
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
It's possible to do it by 2025 or so for new builds as you just up the insulation required to ensure it's not required but a lot of old homes are going to be hopelessly difficult to retrofit with enough insulation to make removing a gas boiler practical.
Can you clarify on that "hard to retrofit"? How many do you think there are?
And how much insulation is necessary to make a removing a gas boiler practical?
(My answers are less than 10% of the stock, and probably anything over an EPC C grade).
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
The only reason why 50% of people go to university is because Labour thought it was a great way to disguise Youth Unemployment.
I think you'll find it's because young people are so much more hardworking and intelligent than they used to be.
That seems to be the consensus view among most politicians, anyway.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
Sadly that is true. I was a university academic from the mid-1960s and can confirm that for both u/g and p/g degree qualifications the standards were slipping noticeably before the millennium. Kingsley Amis was right.
You may not like the results. That doesn't mean the system is analogous to one that led to tens of millions of deaths and a comparable number consigned to slave labour camps.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
To be fair, it's difficult to conceive of a bigger brush strokes fantasy than Brexit.
At the time our last big Gas Storage location closed in 2017 the Secretary of State for Energy who sat on his Rs and did nothing was one ... Greg Clarke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Clark
Yes, gas storage is a legitimate problem. Older facilities weren’t replaced as they reached the end of their life, and governments of all colours allowed Centrica to run down the available storage.
Now it appears that Mr Putin is happy to conduct an experiment on how much he can restrict the gas supply to Europe, we see the predicable result of higher energy prices.
The government bowed to pressure from the Green lobby and was reluctant to be seen to committing ourselves to hydrocarbon dependency going forward. Which would be fine, except that we do have that dependency and it is aggravating an international problem in this country. Unless and until we have adequate alternative supplies and storage capacity we need to improve the storage of gas in this country. It is just mad not to.
+1 - the answer should have been we don't need this capacity long term so we would be happy for it to close in 2030....
Or just tell the Green loonies to f*%k themselves, that heating people's homes in the winter takes priority over fashionable environmental fads, which is more and more what I think they should be doing.
This is about energy security.
There has been both a medium term failure and a number of long term failures of government.
The medium term failure was insufficient focus on gas storage (and nuclear) as a transitional measure away from coal and towards renewables. For short-termist reasons.
The long term failure is that renewable transition which could easily have been a decade or more ahead of where we are now, had we taken *less* heed of the fact that a lot of the UK Green policy has been chaotic nonsense for decades, and thought more about the underlying issue.
Sadly we have 30 years of "if it's Green it must be nonsense" to overcome - which is a legitimate response to large swathes of the (UK) Green movement over the years, but not to the underlying environmental concerns they purport to express.
As things stand we are getting on for a decade ahead of many of our peer countries, so I think we can cut ourselves some slack on that one.
And not really sure about the "if it's Green it's nonsense", either. I think that for real policy initiatives, there has been a lot of significant stuff for a long time.
Agree with the remainder, however.
It's not the *truth* of "if It's Green it's nonsense" - it's that this has been the messaging of the right-of-centre world for ~30 years (the last truly right-of-centre environmental messaging being Thatcher and the ozone hole science >30y ago now). And that supertanker needs to be turned.
And I agree that we are currently with the "leaders" in the space; I'm worried that we are going to be under-invested in the coming decades through complacency and a lack of understanding of the scale of the economic opportunity v. challenge of green tech.
That's complete bollocks.
This country had (once you account for offshored emissions) no emission reduction at all under the last Labour government. None whatsoever.
Emissions under the Tory-led and Tory-only government since 2010 have collapsed as we have turned off the use of coal. Something left-of-centre nations across Europe, or left-of-centre USA under Obama until 2017 haven't done yet.
This country has literally been a world leader under a centre-right government on this issue.
I *completely* agree that we are in the vanguard of turning off coal and all credit to the centre-right governments that have done that.
But right-of-centre messaging has been resolutely "the Greens are loony", and somewhat climate-change-denialist for a long time too. And we need a realignment of policy and messaging (which I think means just ignoring the radical leftist end of the Greens and unambiguously co-opting the lower-case-g green parts of their language.
From my observations, any panic that there was in GM is already over. I filled up on Saturday - there was a queue of five minutes or so, but only for cars with pumps on their right. The left hand pumps were all free. Which made me think the problem was more a case of an imbalance of left- and right-handed pump cars turning up at the same time.
How does the left vs right thing work? Do manufacturers do a 50:50 split across each model, or do they make all cars within the same model either left or right to reduce costs? Presumably there is some goal to even the numbers out? We have the same car as our previous car (but 8 years newer) and the fuel inlet has switched from right to left - the source of much confusion the first few times I filled up the new car.
It’s one of few things that isn’t regulated, so manufacturers choose whichever fuel door placement is most convenient for packaging the car, even with left and right hand drive models of the same car.
Having them in various places makes for an easier time at the pumps, if every car had them driver’s side then one queue would always be bigger than the other.
My car is right hand side and my wife’s left hand side, hers has a release inside whereas mine has a lock connected to the central locking. Requires thought when stopping for fuel. Her car does, as do most modern cars, have a little indicator arrow next to the fuel pump symbol on the gauge, that says which side the door is on.
At the time our last big Gas Storage location closed in 2017 the Secretary of State for Energy who sat on his Rs and did nothing was one ... Greg Clarke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Clark
Yes, gas storage is a legitimate problem. Older facilities weren’t replaced as they reached the end of their life, and governments of all colours allowed Centrica to run down the available storage.
Now it appears that Mr Putin is happy to conduct an experiment on how much he can restrict the gas supply to Europe, we see the predicable result of higher energy prices.
The government bowed to pressure from the Green lobby and was reluctant to be seen to committing ourselves to hydrocarbon dependency going forward. Which would be fine, except that we do have that dependency and it is aggravating an international problem in this country. Unless and until we have adequate alternative supplies and storage capacity we need to improve the storage of gas in this country. It is just mad not to.
+1 - the answer should have been we don't need this capacity long term so we would be happy for it to close in 2030....
Or just tell the Green loonies to f*%k themselves, that heating people's homes in the winter takes priority over fashionable environmental fads, which is more and more what I think they should be doing.
This is about energy security.
There has been both a medium term failure and a number of long term failures of government.
The medium term failure was insufficient focus on gas storage (and nuclear) as a transitional measure away from coal and towards renewables. For short-termist reasons.
The long term failure is that renewable transition which could easily have been a decade or more ahead of where we are now, had we taken *less* heed of the fact that a lot of the UK Green policy has been chaotic nonsense for decades, and thought more about the underlying issue.
Sadly we have 30 years of "if it's Green it must be nonsense" to overcome - which is a legitimate response to large swathes of the (UK) Green movement over the years, but not to the underlying environmental concerns they purport to express.
As things stand we are getting on for a decade ahead of many of our peer countries, so I think we can cut ourselves some slack on that one.
And not really sure about the "if it's Green it's nonsense", either. I think that for real policy initiatives, there has been a lot of significant stuff for a long time.
Agree with the remainder, however.
It's not the *truth* of "if It's Green it's nonsense" - it's that this has been the messaging of the right-of-centre world for ~30 years (the last truly right-of-centre environmental messaging being Thatcher and the ozone hole science >30y ago now). And that supertanker needs to be turned.
And I agree that we are currently with the "leaders" in the space; I'm worried that we are going to be under-invested in the coming decades through complacency and a lack of understanding of the scale of the economic opportunity v. challenge of green tech.
That's complete bollocks.
This country had (once you account for offshored emissions) no emission reduction at all under the last Labour government. None whatsoever.
Emissions under the Tory-led and Tory-only government since 2010 have collapsed as we have turned off the use of coal. Something left-of-centre nations across Europe, or left-of-centre USA under Obama until 2017 haven't done yet.
This country has literally been a world leader under a centre-right government on this issue.
I *completely* agree that we are in the vanguard of turning off coal and all credit to the centre-right governments that have done that.
But right-of-centre messaging has been resolutely "the Greens are loony", and somewhat climate-change-denialist for a long time too. And we need a realignment of policy and messaging (which I think means just ignoring the radical leftist end of the Greens and unambiguously co-opting the lower-case-g green parts of their language.
The Greens (capital G) are loony.
But green issues are not and lowercase g greens have been something Conservatives have led on from Thatcher, to Cameron and Boris.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
I'd disagree with the words 'far more suitable' when applied to our current PM. 'Electorally attractive', perhaps.
On the German election, I believe there was an advisory referendum in Berlin on requisitioning apartments owned by mega landlords to turn in to social housing, won pretty conclusively by the requisitioners. Any of the German experts know if any action will result from this?
Looking at the wiki page for the Berlin state election pretty amazing to see that die Linke were leading the polls a year ago.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
I'd disagree with the words 'far more suitable' when applied to our current PM. 'Electorally attractive', perhaps.
At least May never deliberately misled the Queen.
I'm more worried about Her Maj's subjects! It's not as if she can vote.
Mr. Farooq, possibly. Or possibly treating Communism as a fine idea that just doesn't work is an appallingly lighthearted way to treat a very serious matter. For some reason the old hammer and sickle doesn't get the opprobrium it deserves, on a par with the swastika. I'm not very fond of treating it as some sort of wonderful-if-only idea rather than the absolutely vile and evil ideology it is.
And to compare that to FPTP, in which people freely vote and the person who gets most votes winning (as if that is somehow unfair), is the action of a tinker. And a naughty tinker at that.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
They could not have had a worse conference if they had tried
Utterly bizarre
I did smile at Burley on Sky bemoaning HMG refusing to put up spokespersons while the labour party conference was on
@MehreenKhn EU-US trade and technology council is on this Wednesday but France is still demanding major watering down of conclusions on key EU areas like semi-conductors. French last-ditch asks are causing more consternation among fellow EU countries who assumed the drama was over.
France would also like more references to the EU's "strategic autonomy" in the TTC text. EU ambassadors are due to meet this afternoon to discuss final draft
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
It's possible to do it by 2025 or so for new builds as you just up the insulation required to ensure it's not required but a lot of old homes are going to be hopelessly difficult to retrofit with enough insulation to make removing a gas boiler practical.
Can you clarify on that "hard to retrofit"? How many do you think there are?
And how much insulation is necessary to make a removing a gas boiler practical?
(My answers are less than 10% of the stock, and probably anything over an EPC C grade).
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
My wife refuses to have one. I don't really understand why but, whatever.
Having switched suppliers frequently, we'd never been offered one until a month ago.
That first offer came on behalf of Outfox the Market. I ignored that as we left them over six months ago...
A second offer came on behalf of Avro on the morning of the day they went under. We're ignoring that (if still available) as putting a meter change in the mix of moving suppliers doesn't seem a sensible move.
No objection to getting one of the new ones that actually work across suppliers if we get offered one from our actual supplier and they manage not to go bust the same day.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
I'd disagree with the words 'far more suitable' when applied to our current PM. 'Electorally attractive', perhaps.
At least May never deliberately misled the Queen.
You're welcome to disagree but the voters backed my view. The Tories under Boris got the highest vote share of any party since 1979 (even higher than Blair in 1997).
As for the Queen - if she wants to be involved in politics she should stand for Parliament. Otherwise she's the glorified puppet of the PM of the day and the PM did what he was elected to do and the voters backed him. Good.
Mr. Farooq, possibly. Or possibly treating Communism as a fine idea that just doesn't work is an appallingly lighthearted way to treat a very serious matter. For some reason the old hammer and sickle doesn't get the opprobrium it deserves, on a par with the swastika. I'm not very fond of treating it as some sort of wonderful-if-only idea rather than the absolutely vile and evil ideology it is.
And to compare that to FPTP, in which people freely vote and the person who gets most votes winning (as if that is somehow unfair), is the action of a tinker. And a naughty tinker at that.
To be fair, Mr Dancer; 'From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs' is at least superficially attractive. I'm not sure that there's a similar statement in Fascism.
Being a military man I’m running around like a blue arsed fly at the moment! Tomorrow I’ve got to deliver bisto to Asda Tuesday I’m driving ambulances Wednesday it’s a diesel tanker Thursday I’m plucking turkeys Friday I’m on a jet ski in the channel. Brexit’s bloody knackering https://twitter.com/FlyOnNo10Wall/status/1442164896666308615
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
I'd disagree with the words 'far more suitable' when applied to our current PM. 'Electorally attractive', perhaps.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Because most firms don't offer apprenticeships and those that do have a habit of paying their apprentices as little as possible,
Which means that a lot of poorer people cannot actually afford for their children to accept an apprenticeship.
Case in point one software house around Newcastle was paying £9k a year for a degree apprenticeship, now that is better than nothing but it's not an amount people can live on without help from parents.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
It may be a good policy but from where are Labour proposing to fill the £10bn or so tax shortfall? I'd like to see some detail on this proposal and as I've said, I'm still open minded on voting for Labour vs not voting at all.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
King Cole, one may as well cite the improvement of the economy under Hitler, or him being nice to secretaries.
A solitary line taken in isolation, devoid of wider context or consequence, is worthless.
From that 'appealing' line flows the destruction of democracy and tyranny over the masses, a river of misery lined with crushed hopes and nameless corpses. Private property and personal responsibility are thrown overboard in favour of the 'greater good', the ever-constricting tentacles of a monstrous regime.
I'm rather against soft soaping Communism. An idea that cannot survive contact with reality without leading to despotism and slaughter cannot be described as 'good', however appealing the slogans might be.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Elder son encountered the glass ceiling to which you refer a couple of years after finishing his apprenticeship. It so incensed him that he sought, and got, a Uni place and went on to have a very successful career in a very challenging industry. He's just left, as a result of re-organisation, with a substantial leaving package and a contacts book which will ensure he won't have to touch his savings until such time as he doesn't want to work at all.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
I'm sure this goes down very well with Labour past voters party members:
People seem to be far more concerned with my choice of language than the fact that @BorisJohnson has made comments that are racist, homophobic and sexist.
I'm very happy to sit down with Boris. If he withdraws his comments and apologises, I'll be very happy to apologise to him.
King Cole, one may as well cite the improvement of the economy under Hitler, or him being nice to secretaries.
A solitary line taken in isolation, devoid of wider context or consequence, is worthless.
From that 'appealing' line flows the destruction of democracy and tyranny over the masses, a river of misery lined with crushed hopes and nameless corpses. Private property and personal responsibility are thrown overboard in favour of the 'greater good', the ever-constricting tentacles of a monstrous regime.
I'm rather against soft soaping Communism. An idea that cannot survive contact with reality without leading to despotism and slaughter cannot be described as 'good', however appealing the slogans might be.
Totally agree. In practice in numerous places around the world it has been found to be profoundly evil bringing out the very worst of human nature and even adding some unexpected twists. People who profess to be communists of any stripe get off far too easily.
Mr. Farooq, electoral communism is a contradiction in terms.
It is an analogy to the oft-repeated truism that communism work in theory but not in practice, not a reflection of whether democracy and communism are compatible (they are not).
Except FPTP works in theory and in practice.
Yes, you're right, it does. That's why British politics has been so smooth and trouble free lately.
Absolutely it has. We've been able to get through transformations in our politics and our economy via ballots not violence, as we have on the mainland for centuries. Democracy works in this country.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
I'd disagree with the words 'far more suitable' when applied to our current PM. 'Electorally attractive', perhaps.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
3 years time by which time some of the issues will be solved as the 2023 revaluations will reflect the reduce value of high street properties
But I actually don't think business rates by itself solves any problems, a lot of sites are configured for large retailers who no longer exist so how do you take a large empty M&S and transform it into a number of smaller shops for smaller local retailers.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
It does not seem to be a problem with independence falling behind in the polls
Also its quite hard to match, let alone exceed, the efforts of the likes of Wings over Scotland yesterday. That was just brutal. The Yes movement is eating its own and their viciousness is impressive.
But my wife, who listens to a lot more local radio than I do, says there has been a marked uptick in UK departments, policies, COP26 etc in the last year. The profile of the UK government in Scotland has definitely increased and this is being reflected in the polling.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
2014 was a once in a generation referendum, they don't need to until a generation has elapsed since then.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
I'm still not clear on whether it's a once in a generation referendum or NEVER for the Tories. I suspect you're not clear about this in your own wee noddle, so we share that at least.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
No detail whatsoever on what might replace rates - but they are quite correct in recognising that rates valuations now bear little or no reaction to either the value of properties, or the ability of businesses to pay.
Michel Barnier: "Brexit is not nothing. If people say that there's no need for any change in Brussels although the UK has left, then they haven't understood anything... I want to change a number of things in the EU that are not working."
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
To be fair though, Labour have kind of nicked it from the Tories! Rishi already abolished High Street business rates for the duration of the pandemic and has already said there's a review into it I believe for the future. So Labour are kind of jumping onto fertile soil there.
But turnabout is fairplay. No reason the Opposition can't nick and promote ideas the Government have had which they're not 100% committed to yet, any more than the Government can nick Opposition ones.
Either way having the Labour Shadow Chancellor discussing business taxes in a view of "how can businesses be helped" instead of "how much more can we raise from businesses" as John McDonnell always did is quite refreshing.
If Labour could actually concentrate on reducing the tax burden on workers, employers etc rather than just view the answer to every problem as "spend more money" and giving us the bill then I might even vote for them. Especially if the Tories are going to just keep raising my taxes otherwise.
King Cole, one may as well cite the improvement of the economy under Hitler, or him being nice to secretaries.
A solitary line taken in isolation, devoid of wider context or consequence, is worthless.
From that 'appealing' line flows the destruction of democracy and tyranny over the masses, a river of misery lined with crushed hopes and nameless corpses. Private property and personal responsibility are thrown overboard in favour of the 'greater good', the ever-constricting tentacles of a monstrous regime.
I'm rather against soft soaping Communism. An idea that cannot survive contact with reality without leading to despotism and slaughter cannot be described as 'good', however appealing the slogans might be.
I'm not saying you are wrong about either the Soviet Russian or Chinese systems but similar accusations and criticisms could reasonably be levelled against many philosophies and indeed religions except, AIUI, Taoism.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
This weekend they called Tory voters "scum", batted away any suggestion women are biologically distinctive, and raised worry beads for Tory Remainers in the south-east through noises on tax and whacking VAT on private school fees.
Labour truly do the Lord's work - for the Conservative Party.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
Agreed. I don't have massive confidence that the solution will be completely practical, but they are at least beginning to think along the right lines.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
No detail whatsoever on what might replace rates - but they are quite correct in recognising that rates valuations now bear little or no reaction to either the value of properties, or the ability of businesses to pay.
Again clueless > attack relief on income from buy-to-let properties but no mention of the ability to expense interest on buy to let properties held within a limited company.
Yep it's niche but they shouldn't be looking at relief you need to look at a sector / asset and work out how best can we extract tax from it....
Also high street shops can't and won't up sticks and move to France or Ireland but all manufacturing and all invisible firms such as internet firms can.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
They could not have had a worse conference if they had tried
Utterly bizarre
I did smile at Burley on Sky bemoaning HMG refusing to put up spokespersons while the labour party conference was on
Clever and astute, why interrupt them
Why would the government but a Tory up to argue with a Labour shadow, when the media will happily put two Labour MPs on to argue with each other. Usually quite a heated argument, over something utterly trivial.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
It may be a good policy but from where are Labour proposing to fill the £10bn or so tax shortfall? I'd like to see some detail on this proposal and as I've said, I'm still open minded on voting for Labour vs not voting at all.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
This weekend they called Tory voters "scum", batted away any suggestion women are biologically distinctive, and raised worry beads for Tory Remainers in the south-east through noises on tax and whacking VAT on private school fees.
Labour truly do the Lord's work - for the Conservative Party.
"This bounty hunter Tory is my kind of scum. Fearless and inventive!"
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
only the high street so it's probably £10-15bn not £30bn but even so a Government would need that money coming from somewhere.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
This weekend they called Tory voters "scum", batted away any suggestion women are biologically distinctive, and raised worry beads for Tory Remainers in the south-east through noises on tax and whacking VAT on private school fees.
Labour truly do the Lord's work - for the Conservative Party.
Indeed. The Shadow Chancellor calling for an easing on tax pressures on businesses really goes against the grain of the rest of the Conference and is likely to be entirely missed by the public versus the issues you spoke about.
If Labour could just STFU about stupid issues and think about how to be sensible then they might actually win voters. Perhaps Rachel Reeves should be party leader?
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
What I remember of Blair was the vision of how to make things better, the priorities, the education, education education. I'm sure he ripped the Tories apart in the commons, but I don't recall him spending that much time in public talking about them. I don't remember the killer attack lines, if there were some. I remember the vision, the setting out of priorities for a Labour government.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
It may be a good policy but from where are Labour proposing to fill the £10bn or so tax shortfall? I'd like to see some detail on this proposal and as I've said, I'm still open minded on voting for Labour vs not voting at all.
I'm not.
Were you ever? Didn't you make HYUFD's true Tory list the other day?
On the German election, I believe there was an advisory referendum in Berlin on requisitioning apartments owned by mega landlords to turn in to social housing, won pretty conclusively by the requisitioners. Any of the German experts know if any action will result from this?
Looking at the wiki page for the Berlin state election pretty amazing to see that die Linke were leading the polls a year ago.
I'm sure this goes down very well with Labour past voters party members:
People seem to be far more concerned with my choice of language than the fact that @BorisJohnson has made comments that are racist, homophobic and sexist.
I'm very happy to sit down with Boris. If he withdraws his comments and apologises, I'll be very happy to apologise to him.
At the time our last big Gas Storage location closed in 2017 the Secretary of State for Energy who sat on his Rs and did nothing was one ... Greg Clarke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Clark
Yes, gas storage is a legitimate problem. Older facilities weren’t replaced as they reached the end of their life, and governments of all colours allowed Centrica to run down the available storage.
Now it appears that Mr Putin is happy to conduct an experiment on how much he can restrict the gas supply to Europe, we see the predicable result of higher energy prices.
The government bowed to pressure from the Green lobby and was reluctant to be seen to committing ourselves to hydrocarbon dependency going forward. Which would be fine, except that we do have that dependency and it is aggravating an international problem in this country. Unless and until we have adequate alternative supplies and storage capacity we need to improve the storage of gas in this country. It is just mad not to.
+1 - the answer should have been we don't need this capacity long term so we would be happy for it to close in 2030....
Or just tell the Green loonies to f*%k themselves, that heating people's homes in the winter takes priority over fashionable environmental fads, which is more and more what I think they should be doing.
This is about energy security.
There has been both a medium term failure and a number of long term failures of government.
The medium term failure was insufficient focus on gas storage (and nuclear) as a transitional measure away from coal and towards renewables. For short-termist reasons.
The long term failure is that renewable transition which could easily have been a decade or more ahead of where we are now, had we taken *less* heed of the fact that a lot of the UK Green policy has been chaotic nonsense for decades, and thought more about the underlying issue.
Sadly we have 30 years of "if it's Green it must be nonsense" to overcome - which is a legitimate response to large swathes of the (UK) Green movement over the years, but not to the underlying environmental concerns they purport to express.
As things stand we are getting on for a decade ahead of many of our peer countries, so I think we can cut ourselves some slack on that one.
And not really sure about the "if it's Green it's nonsense", either. I think that for real policy initiatives, there has been a lot of significant stuff for a long time.
Agree with the remainder, however.
It's not the *truth* of "if It's Green it's nonsense" - it's that this has been the messaging of the right-of-centre world for ~30 years (the last truly right-of-centre environmental messaging being Thatcher and the ozone hole science >30y ago now). And that supertanker needs to be turned.
And I agree that we are currently with the "leaders" in the space; I'm worried that we are going to be under-invested in the coming decades through complacency and a lack of understanding of the scale of the economic opportunity v. challenge of green tech.
That's complete bollocks.
This country had (once you account for offshored emissions) no emission reduction at all under the last Labour government. None whatsoever.
Emissions under the Tory-led and Tory-only government since 2010 have collapsed as we have turned off the use of coal. Something left-of-centre nations across Europe, or left-of-centre USA under Obama until 2017 haven't done yet.
This country has literally been a world leader under a centre-right government on this issue.
I *completely* agree that we are in the vanguard of turning off coal and all credit to the centre-right governments that have done that.
But right-of-centre messaging has been resolutely "the Greens are loony", and somewhat climate-change-denialist for a long time too. And we need a realignment of policy and messaging (which I think means just ignoring the radical leftist end of the Greens and unambiguously co-opting the lower-case-g green parts of their language.
The Greens (capital G) are loony.
But green issues are not and lowercase g greens have been something Conservatives have led on from Thatcher, to Cameron and Boris.
I agree, but it takes a long while for the turnaround in messaging to cut through.
It used to be the strategy to position against "the left" with these kinds of statements:
And now they need to work hard to describe it as "a change of mind" - despite all the work in government that meant that we are better placed than many to push on from here.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
2014 was a once in a generation referendum, they don't need to until a generation has elapsed since then.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
I'm still not clear on whether it's a once in a generation referendum or NEVER for the Tories. I suspect you're not clear about this in your own wee noddle, so we share that at least.
Once in a generation which in my book means about 25 years. But even a stalwart and steadfast Blue Lovely as I aspire to be, would harbour doubts about the party remaining continuously in office until 2039.
HYFUD talks about a putative (minority) Labour Govt in 2023/4 granting a referendum as a precondition for SNP acquiescence. But I suspect that Sir Keir won't budge and challenge Ian Blackford to vote with the hated Tories to bring his govt down on its Queens Speech.
Who knows; it's all pretty pointless conjecture at this stage anyway. FWIW - and it ain't worth much I readily concede - my hunch from Surrey Mansions is that the next referendum won't take place before 2030.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
But the first part of the policy ought to make it easier to repurpose high street properties large numbers of which are just sitting vacant.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
To be fair one reason why people purchase stuff online is its cheaper - and one reason its cheaper is that online isn't taxed at the same rate that physical transactions are.
Taxing business transactions via VAT not via location and ensuring online transactions are covered by VAT (which has been worked on in recent years to be fair) ought to cover it. If money is taxed when it changes hands, however it changes hands, then all pay their share equally.
Can someone tell me which seats Die Linke won? The Guardian interactive map suggests the Greens won the Berlin seats held by Die Linke before the election.
Comments
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
I haven't refuelled since the panic started so yes I am behaving rationally. I could join the morons and top-up my tank, but I won't because I don't need to do so.
You may not like the results. That doesn't mean the system is analogous to one that led to tens of millions of deaths and a comparable number consigned to slave labour camps.
It is not all over but nor is it that drivers are not getting fuel if they queue
Indeed this mornings media broadcasts from the filling stations were quite encouraging
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
Most voters will vote for the leader and their party, apart from just a few who know the candidate
That's amusing! 😂
https://onefile.co.uk/explore/which-is-better-university-degrees-or-higher-apprenticeships/
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
How long until shell also go bust?
Mr. Farooq, *raises an eyebrow*
Someone's being a silly sausage.
Even when the Tories made the awful mistake of making May PM the system worked, denying her a majority and leading to her downfall and a far more suitable PM who was able to win a healthy majority.
And how much insulation is necessary to make a removing a gas boiler practical?
(My answers are less than 10% of the stock, and probably anything over an EPC C grade).
That seems to be the consensus view among most politicians, anyway.
I'm completely shocked by the lack of preparation Labour has done for this conference, it really wasn't difficult - talk about NI increases, introduce the discussions regarding a wealth tax and just keep everything else ticking along.
But right-of-centre messaging has been resolutely "the Greens are loony", and somewhat climate-change-denialist for a long time too. And we need a realignment of policy and messaging (which I think means just ignoring the radical leftist end of the Greens and unambiguously co-opting the lower-case-g green parts of their language.
But green issues are not and lowercase g greens have been something Conservatives have led on from Thatcher, to Cameron and Boris.
Edit my mistake they bought First Utility then - but shell have had an UK consumer electricity and gas brand since 2019.
At least May never deliberately misled the Queen.
As an aside, you do not expect to be in your queue until Wednesday do you !!!!!!!!!!!
Looking at the wiki page for the Berlin state election pretty amazing to see that die Linke were leading the polls a year ago.
And to compare that to FPTP, in which people freely vote and the person who gets most votes winning (as if that is somehow unfair), is the action of a tinker. And a naughty tinker at that.
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Utterly bizarre
I did smile at Burley on Sky bemoaning HMG refusing to put up spokespersons while the labour party conference was on
Clever and astute, why interrupt them
EU-US trade and technology council is on this Wednesday but France is still demanding major watering down of conclusions on key EU areas like semi-conductors. French last-ditch asks are causing more consternation among fellow EU countries who assumed the drama was over.
France would also like more references to the EU's "strategic autonomy" in the TTC text. EU ambassadors are due to meet this afternoon to discuss final draft
https://twitter.com/MehreenKhn/status/1442434821909712902
That first offer came on behalf of Outfox the Market. I ignored that as we left them over six months ago...
A second offer came on behalf of Avro on the morning of the day they went under. We're ignoring that (if still available) as putting a meter change in the mix of moving suppliers doesn't seem a sensible move.
No objection to getting one of the new ones that actually work across suppliers if we get offered one from our actual supplier and they manage not to go bust the same day.
As for the Queen - if she wants to be involved in politics she should stand for Parliament. Otherwise she's the glorified puppet of the PM of the day and the PM did what he was elected to do and the voters backed him. Good.
I'm not sure that there's a similar statement in Fascism.
Tomorrow I’ve got to deliver bisto to Asda
Tuesday I’m driving ambulances
Wednesday it’s a diesel tanker
Thursday I’m plucking turkeys
Friday I’m on a jet ski in the channel.
Brexit’s bloody knackering
https://twitter.com/FlyOnNo10Wall/status/1442164896666308615
Which means that a lot of poorer people cannot actually afford for their children to accept an apprenticeship.
Case in point one software house around Newcastle was paying £9k a year for a degree apprenticeship, now that is better than nothing but it's not an amount people can live on without help from parents.
A solitary line taken in isolation, devoid of wider context or consequence, is worthless.
From that 'appealing' line flows the destruction of democracy and tyranny over the masses, a river of misery lined with crushed hopes and nameless corpses. Private property and personal responsibility are thrown overboard in favour of the 'greater good', the ever-constricting tentacles of a monstrous regime.
I'm rather against soft soaping Communism. An idea that cannot survive contact with reality without leading to despotism and slaughter cannot be described as 'good', however appealing the slogans might be.
He's just left, as a result of re-organisation, with a substantial leaving package and a contacts book which will ensure he won't have to touch his savings until such time as he doesn't want to work at all.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive
Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union
They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently
They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
https://tinyurl.com/3zjw52ck
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
People seem to be far more concerned with my choice of language than the fact that @BorisJohnson has made comments that are racist, homophobic and sexist.
I'm very happy to sit down with Boris. If he withdraws his comments and apologises, I'll be very happy to apologise to him.
https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/1442433911859019780?s=20
Which prize, exactly, has Angela set her eyes upon?
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
I see what you did there. Nice try
But I actually don't think business rates by itself solves any problems, a lot of sites are configured for large retailers who no longer exist so how do you take a large empty M&S and transform it into a number of smaller shops for smaller local retailers.
But my wife, who listens to a lot more local radio than I do, says there has been a marked uptick in UK departments, policies, COP26 etc in the last year. The profile of the UK government in Scotland has definitely increased and this is being reflected in the polling.
I suspect you're not clear about this in your own wee noddle, so we share that at least.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/26/labour-to-scrap-business-rates-if-elected-says-shadow-chancellor
No detail whatsoever on what might replace rates - but they are quite correct in recognising that rates valuations now bear little or no reaction to either the value of properties, or the ability of businesses to pay.
https://twitter.com/franceinter/status/1442383410534641667
But turnabout is fairplay. No reason the Opposition can't nick and promote ideas the Government have had which they're not 100% committed to yet, any more than the Government can nick Opposition ones.
Either way having the Labour Shadow Chancellor discussing business taxes in a view of "how can businesses be helped" instead of "how much more can we raise from businesses" as John McDonnell always did is quite refreshing.
If Labour could actually concentrate on reducing the tax burden on workers, employers etc rather than just view the answer to every problem as "spend more money" and giving us the bill then I might even vote for them. Especially if the Tories are going to just keep raising my taxes otherwise.
Labour truly do the Lord's work - for the Conservative Party.
I don't have massive confidence that the solution will be completely practical, but they are at least beginning to think along the right lines.
Yep it's niche but they shouldn't be looking at relief you need to look at a sector / asset and work out how best can we extract tax from it....
Also high street shops can't and won't up sticks and move to France or Ireland but all manufacturing and all invisible firms such as internet firms can.
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
(only kidding!)
If Labour could just STFU about stupid issues and think about how to be sensible then they might actually win voters. Perhaps Rachel Reeves should be party leader?
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
What I remember of Blair was the vision of how to make things better, the priorities, the education, education education. I'm sure he ripped the Tories apart in the commons, but I don't recall him spending that much time in public talking about them. I don't remember the killer attack lines, if there were some. I remember the vision, the setting out of priorities for a Labour government.
Die Grune member and lives in Berlin.
It used to be the strategy to position against "the left" with these kinds of statements:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/20/johnson-defends-new-trade-secretary-after-climate-crisis-denial-tweets
And now they need to work hard to describe it as "a change of mind" - despite all the work in government that meant that we are better placed than many to push on from here.
HYFUD talks about a putative (minority) Labour Govt in 2023/4 granting a referendum as a precondition for SNP acquiescence. But I suspect that Sir Keir won't budge and challenge Ian Blackford to vote with the hated Tories to bring his govt down on its Queens Speech.
Who knows; it's all pretty pointless conjecture at this stage anyway. FWIW - and it ain't worth much I readily concede - my hunch from Surrey Mansions is that the next referendum won't take place before 2030.
Taxing business transactions via VAT not via location and ensuring online transactions are covered by VAT (which has been worked on in recent years to be fair) ought to cover it. If money is taxed when it changes hands, however it changes hands, then all pay their share equally.