I've only ever been to the Falklands once to join a T23. The worst part of the whole experience was spending three days interned at Brize Norton while the RAF tried to make one working Tristar out of all of their broken ones. I didn't see much of it as I went straight from Maggie's Pleasant Airfield to the ship. The bit I did see looked like North Wales with slightly better weather.
Hartlepools (both of them) have rightly been identified as a toilet. But you think that's bad go to various ex pit villages across Durham.
There has been a structural imbalance in the economy since the 1980s and nobody has found a solution for it
Unfortunately Brexit and a Tory government is not the manna from heaven they were hoping for. I suspect voter turnout will drop heavily in that part of the world
Well that sort of works for Johnson too.
I used to work in a pit village near Pontefract in the 1990s. An awful lot of European Social Fund money had been thrown at these places and to little avail. Light industrial units, water parks. We relocated a light engineering company from Wakefield, half a dozen miles away. The rent and rates were cheaper but exactly the same people worked there who had worked at Horbury Junction. So even if Johnson has the will and pockets to level these places up, I am sceptical as to how it will work.
Equally, here in South Wales. Social Fund money brought the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Bosch and Ford to the M4 corridor. Once the money stopped, so did the interest.Oh and we have good communication links with London and the Midlands.
I’ve been to Hartlepool. Can many PBers claim the same?
It's a rare migrant bird hotspot. So yes, several times.
I will again relate the story of going for the Orphean Warbler. Several of us were walking around the Headland looking for the bird, with thousands of pounds worth of telescopes and binoculars, when about a dozen youths on bikes raced up towards us.
"Wot yer doin'?" we were brusquely asked. We clutched our optics closer to our chests, expecting to be relieved of them, as I said we had travelled a long way to look for a rare bird that had been seen but had currently vanished. A pause.
"Well, I hope youse all see it - and safe journey home!" - and with that, they were off.
Soft spot for Hartlepool.
I rather like the Headland. It’s a shame you need to spend 15 minutes driving through the rest of Hartlepool to get there.
And that isn’t meant as a dig, I could equally complain about getting to the seafront at South Shields or Whitley Bay.
I’ve been to Hartlepool. Can many PBers claim the same?
It's a rare migrant bird hotspot. So yes, several times.
I will again relate the story of going for the Orphean Warbler. Several of us were walking around the Headland looking for the bird, with thousands of pounds worth of telescopes and binoculars, when about a dozen youths on bikes raced up towards us.
"Wot yer doin'?" we were brusquely asked. We clutched our optics closer to our chests, expecting to be relieved of them, as I said we had travelled a long way to look for a rare bird that had been seen but had currently vanished. A pause.
"Well, I hope youse all see it - and safe journey home!" - and with that, they were off.
Soft spot for Hartlepool.
I went there with my wife for a wedding on a ship permanently moored in the harbour. Wouldn't have been my choice for a place to get hitched but wasn't bad - all the ship's officers suitably in uniform and everything spick and span.
Wandered into the town afterwards. The area near the harbour is like a lot of similar declining harbour areas which haven't yet had the magic Liverpool/Hamburg/Atlanta revamp - good for fast food and pubs, otherwise a bit depressed. But like a lot of places with a poor reputation (e.g. the Glasgow tenements) a lot better than you'd think, and as Mark found, people are normally decent enough most of the time wherever you go unless you go out of your way to wind them up.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
+1
Running fast and slow trains on the same track really does mess up capacity. You end up with say 12 trains an hour on the ECML when you could easily run 18 or 24 an hour if they all move at the same speed.
And that’s before you look at the 24 trains an hour that could be running on HS2.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
Hartlepools (both of them) have rightly been identified as a toilet. But you think that's bad go to various ex pit villages across Durham.
There has been a structural imbalance in the economy since the 1980s and nobody has found a solution for it
Unfortunately Brexit and a Tory government is not the manna from heaven they were hoping for. I suspect voter turnout will drop heavily in that part of the world
Well that sort of works for Johnson too.
I used to work in a pit village near Pontefract in the 1990s. An awful lot of European Social Fund money had been thrown at these places and to little avail. Light industrial units, water parks. We relocated a light engineering company from Wakefield, half a dozen miles away. The rent and rates were cheaper but exactly the same people worked there who had worked at Horbury Junction. So even if Johnson has the will and pockets to level these places up, I am sceptical as to how it will work.
Equally, here in South Wales. Social Fund money brought the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Bosch and Ford to the M4 corridor. Once the money stopped, so did the interest.Oh and we have good communication links with London and the Midlands.
That has always been (and probably always will be) the biggest issue with enterprise zones. They either poach nearby businesses wanting to save a few quid or attract economic migrant companies that will open up anywhere until the incentives in that location are bettered elsewhere.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
+1
Running fast and slow trains on the same track really does mess up capacity. You end up with say 12 trains an hour on the ECML when you could easily run 18 or 24 an hour if they all move at the same speed.
And that’s before you look at the 24 trains an hour that could be running on HS2.
14, not 24. But yes, it’s estimated to triple capacity overall.
A great bit of air travel bullshit at the gate. "Can I have your quarantine form please" "I don't need one, I'm transit at Schiphol" "Yes you do" hands over form. Ok so it was simple to complete but here's the fun bit.
I do not need to show anything for transit. Dutch government clear that I don't need the form. KLM want it anyways for shits and giggles.
Have to say that the arrivals process in the UK is a piece of piss now that the fit to fly test is gone. The PLF attaches to a passport number so no one asks for it at the border or does any manual scans. You could see when people hadn't filled one out the e-gate would flash red and send them to manual queue.
All eight of us got through in no time at all, if we didn't have to wear the stupid masks it would have been the old normal on arrival. I very much look forwards to the day that we get rid of them completely in airports and on planes. One airline needs to just go for it and say vaccines are mandatory and masks aren't. I can't imagine having to wear it for a long haul flight and currently it's putting me and my wife off going to Thailand.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
The protocol solved the issue at the time and unlocked the larger Brexit deal. So yes, it was a triumph
It was intended to be replaced but no progress has been made towards the envisaged scheme that would replace it, so you can question whether it is still suitable.
The entire GFA concept was built on buy-in from both the nationalist and the unionist communities. I am saddened that you no longer think this is important.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
There will be no trade war over the NI Protocol. The TCA has been signed and it isn't in scope for retaliatory measures other than the EU giving notice of withdrawal which is highly unlikely as all 27 nations would need to agree and why should Italy, Greece or Bulgaria put their trade with the UK at risk for a border dispute they give no fucks about?
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
Having traduced a highly effective and cheap vaccine, and then launched a court case against the manufacturer to cover their embarrassment.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
The only reason you claim ‘you are being proved right’ is because you have refused to engage with any actual evidence, which unfortunately for you happens to demonstrate you are wrong. I appreciate this makes it easier for you to believe you’re right.
I’m intrigued about your username in light of this. Are you a member of the Richard III society by any chance?
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
Digs his heels in and mutters darkly about “bad faith”?
You seem to believe that a minority should be able to threaten violence in order to override the views of the majority. I don't.
So you want to abandon the entire principle underpinning the Good Friday Agreement?
Buy-in from the representatives of both communities
Do you ever take a step back to think about where your monomania has taken you?
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
Yes. An arrangement that while nice to have benefits them more than us, since we are net importers and they are net exporters. What of it?
Nicola Sturgeon kept Scotland in the dark over its first mass Covid outbreak against the advice of her health minister and the deputy chief medical officer — and a leading scientist says it potentially exposed more people to the virus
The lengths that leavers are going to to spin acting in bad faith as just normal things governments do is embarrassing .
The fact is no 10 signed an agreement they never had any intention of implementing, and have made no effort to make the protocol work .
The ECJ issue was nowhere to be seen earlier in the year , this has appeared because Frost and Johnson want to keep the UK in a constant war of words with the EU .
The biggest loser if this ends up in a trade war will be the UK , both sides will be harmed but facts matter . The EU is less reliant on exports to the UK than the other way round .
Any Leaver arguing otherwise just needs to look at official government data !
Hartlepools (both of them) have rightly been identified as a toilet. But you think that's bad go to various ex pit villages across Durham.
There has been a structural imbalance in the economy since the 1980s and nobody has found a solution for it
Unfortunately Brexit and a Tory government is not the manna from heaven they were hoping for. I suspect voter turnout will drop heavily in that part of the world
Well that sort of works for Johnson too.
I used to work in a pit village near Pontefract in the 1990s. An awful lot of European Social Fund money had been thrown at these places and to little avail. Light industrial units, water parks. We relocated a light engineering company from Wakefield, half a dozen miles away. The rent and rates were cheaper but exactly the same people worked there who had worked at Horbury Junction. So even if Johnson has the will and pockets to level these places up, I am sceptical as to how it will work.
Equally, here in South Wales. Social Fund money brought the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Bosch and Ford to the M4 corridor. Once the money stopped, so did the interest.Oh and we have good communication links with London and the Midlands.
In Yorkshire the pit villages have improved significantly during the last decade and its the the big towns which are looking rough.
How much that is a fundamental change or merely a displacement of economic activity / housing desirability I'm not sure.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Not at all. The NI MPs in Westminster have almost unanimously said they oppose the Protocol and want it replacing and would be happy to see A16 invoked.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
The lengths that leavers are going to to spin acting in bad faith as just normal things governments do is embarrassing .
The fact is no 10 signed an agreement they never had any intention of implementing, and have made no effort to make the protocol work .
The ECJ issue was nowhere to be seen earlier in the year , this has appeared because Frost and Johnson want to keep the UK in a constant war of words with the EU .
The biggest loser if this ends up in a trade war will be the UK , both sides will be harmed but facts matter . The EU is less reliant on exports to the UK than the other way round .
Any Leaver arguing otherwise just needs to look at official government data !
This bad faith argument is patent bullshit.
Invoking Article 16 is implementing the deal in good faith. That's why the Article is there in the first place.
No international law is broken if an article of a treaty gets invoked for the literal reasons it was written.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Not at all. The NI MPs in Westminster have almost unanimously said they oppose the Protocol and want it replacing and would be happy to see A16 invoked.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
Same thing.
Sophistry - The Northern Ireland assembly represents the views of the people of Northern Ireland. That is also explicitly recognised in the protocol.
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
It is also a category error to think that centrists want boring steady as she goes stuff. I am very much a centrist in favour of radical change. I am just happy picking from the rights toolbox or the lefts toolbox pragmatically on a case by case basis.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Not at all. The NI MPs in Westminster have almost unanimously said they oppose the Protocol and want it replacing and would be happy to see A16 invoked.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
Same thing.
Sophistry - The Northern Ireland assembly represents the views of the people of Northern Ireland. That is also explicitly recognised in the protocol.
Parliament represents the UK and the NI representatives in Parliament have advocated for A16 to be invoked unless their concerns are met.
Are you saying the UK government should ignore the NI representatives in the UK Parliament that they elected?
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
And in shock news today, BJO still hates Keir Starmer.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
Yes. An arrangement that while nice to have benefits them more than us, since we are net importers and they are net exporters. What of it?
They are 27 individual countries that export into the one market. We are one country that exports into one Single Market. A trade war hurts us more than it hurts them.
There is no argument with someone who believes that Portugal stands to lose more from its goods attracting a tariff on entering the UK market than the UK does from having tariffs attached to its exports entering the Single Market. If you think that so be it!
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
Edit: and Von Spee was one of the German casualties.
Drachinfel's done something on that battle recently.
The sad thing is that, after his brilliant victory at the Battle of Coronel, von Spee pretty much knew he and his ships were done for. They'd used up half of their ammunition, were short on coal, and unless they were very lucky, were going to come up against more British ships.
But how different the Battle of Coronel might have been if the Canopus's chief engineer hadn't been (ahem) mentally unstable...
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
That’s a useless metric, what was the Con to Lab swing in 2017 compared to say 1997?
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
I will ytake that as you don’t have a valid argument so will continue by sticking my fingers in my ears.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Today is the 47th anniversary of the last time a Labour leader other than Blair won a general election for Labour HT @TSEofPB
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
Corbyn lost in 2017. "Biggest increase in cite share?" The Tories piled fucking 20% on top of their 2015 majority you tool.
Shithousery at Aberdeen airport. A 15 minute delay now 45 minutes due to baggage handling lunacy. A first for me sitting on a plane in my seat watching my suitcase being loaded. After we had already been told to go and then told not to go...
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
Nick, that is a good analysis. Blair's secret sauce in 1997 was that he realised it was not persuading people to vote for Labour but also that some people would never vote Labour but it was good enough they abstained from voting, hence you had to be non-scary. Hence, why he won his landslide with fewer votes than Major in 1992. Both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn had attributes that motivated Tory voters to come out.
Unfortunately for Labour, so does Starmer, because he is seen as as being a metropolitan woke crusader regardless of what he says in public (in this regards Blair doesn't help - for a large section of the population, he is seen as a glib charlatan who pulled the wool over their eyes).
However, when it comes to the scariness factor, Labour has a much bigger problem in that large chunks of the electorate are scared by them - maybe not so much Starmer but the MPs and activist base. They fear (probably rightly) that a PM Starmer would cave into the woke warrior faction and that, if you are in an 'unfavoured' (i.e. white and not an urban graduate working in the public sector and / or favoured professions such as law) category, you will get discriminated against. For many people, a Labour Government would mean 4-5 years of relentless wokedom with attempts to tied us effectively back to the EU.
One other big problem for Labour which wasn't an issue for Blair in 1997 - the rise of social media. If Labour wants to get elected, the best thing it can do is put the woke stuff to bed, focus on the bread and butter issues and come up with some imaginative solutions. Unfortunately that is almost impossible in this day and age. There is no way Labour now would be able to control its internal messaging as Blair and Campbell did for the first several years.
On the subject of exotic places visited: my contributions would include Berlin before the wall came down Belgrade Delphi (seriously, if you haven’t been, go) The Forbidden City Ulaanbataar
I don't have a strong hand in this game but I can claim Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan when they were still a part of the Soviet Union.
You have reminded me of one I really should have thought of: Leningrad!
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
The only reason you claim ‘you are being proved right’ is because you have refused to engage with any actual evidence, which unfortunately for you happens to demonstrate you are wrong. I appreciate this makes it easier for you to believe you’re right.
I’m intrigued about your username in light of this. Are you a member of the Richard III society by any chance?
This is what I predicted a decade ago:
1) London wants more infrastructure spending
2) The southern part of HS2 benefits London the northern parts don't
3) HS2 would be sold as benefitting the North
4) Construction would begin in London so London gets the benefits it wanted
5) Costs would rise and there would be years of delays
6) Other transport improvements in the North would be stopped as money is spent on HS2
7) Costs would rise more and yet more delays
8) A financial crisis would occur - I assumed after a recession didn't expect covid
9) Cutbacks in the northern parts of HS2 would happen
I was struck watching Blair & Brown how much time Blair spent smiling, especially in his early career. A constant broad grin.
That must have sent a strong subliminal message to voters. This chap is enjoying himself, he likes Britain, he is optimistic about the future. Let’s follow him. Brown on the other hand was forever frowning.
Keir is not a smiler. He looks miserable. Corbyn was worse: not just miserable but angry. I’m not sure smiling is an absolute prerequisite for success, after all Merkel is hardly full of cheer most of the time and Putin isn’t the Cheshire Cat, but looking miserable can’t be a net benefit.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
Yes. An arrangement that while nice to have benefits them more than us, since we are net importers and they are net exporters. What of it?
They are 27 individual countries that export into the one market. We are one country that exports into one Single Market. A trade war hurts us more than it hurts them.
There is no argument with someone who believes that Portugal stands to lose more from its goods attracting a tariff on entering the UK market than the UK does from having tariffs attached to its exports entering the Single Market. If you think that so be it!
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Not at all. The NI MPs in Westminster have almost unanimously said they oppose the Protocol and want it replacing and would be happy to see A16 invoked.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
Same thing.
Sophistry - The Northern Ireland assembly represents the views of the people of Northern Ireland. That is also explicitly recognised in the protocol.
Parliament represents the UK and the NI representatives in Parliament have advocated for A16 to be invoked unless their concerns are met.
Are you saying the UK government should ignore the NI representatives in the UK Parliament that they elected?
Sophistry, Phil. The protocol makes clear that the Northern Ireland assembly is the representative body of the people of Northern Ireland. It is via assembly elections that the people there signal their approval or otherwise of the protocol. You pretending otherwise doesn't make it any less true.
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
"It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist". Lol! Did you not read TSE's header Nick? The only successful leader you have had since 1974 was a centrist, with a strongly centrist message. He marginalised the left wing headbangers, and, though I was never a fan, led a pretty effective government and a highly effective political strategy that kept the Tories out of power until Labour was stupid enough to replace him with a bean-counter.
That said, Gordon Brown was a reasoned decision compared to putting Mr. Thicky in charge. It is extraordinary that someone who used to be a Labour MP, so therefore should be politically informed, can be so politically deluded.
In thrall to one capricious character with few deep beliefs, the Tories are abandoning once-cherished convictions and trashing traditional allies.
The Boris cult involves human sacrifice. We were witnesses to the humiliating abasement of his cabinet colleagues, the mere mortals who supposedly run important departments. I’ve been present at Tory conferences since the mid-1980s. The leader has always been top of the bill, but there were opportunities for the supporting acts to share the spotlight. Those of the cabinet who were allowed to speak – many of them weren’t even given that courtesy – were permitted only a truncated time in a small auditorium with awful acoustics.
The prime minister’s speech was a breathless and jumbled hurtle through slogans, wordplay, boasts, metaphors and jokes, jokes and more jokes. Some of them were very good, but never before have I heard a leader’s speech in which virtually every other sentence was a punchline in search of a guffaw.
You would not know that there are queues for petrol, bare supermarket shelves, surging energy prices, welfare cuts and looming tax rises from his breezy boosterism. It is in the nature of cults that they are detached from reality. I asked one senior Tory whether he was any the wiser about what Johnsonism amounted to. He sighed: “Surely we have got to the point where we realise there isn’t such a thing as Johnsonism. It is whatever works for him on the day.”
There are consequences from putting a party in such thrall to one mercurial personality. The American Republicans discovered that when their party fell into the hands of Donald Trump, who proceeded to trash many of their previously cherished principles. Something similar, if not yet quite so dramatic, is happening to the Conservatives. They used to be the party of business and farmers. If they were anything, they were that. Not any more. Mr Johnson flippantly shrugs at the travails of farmers and attacks business because he thinks that is to his advantage at this particular time.
Something we know about cults is that they tend to end badly. We cannot say with certainty when this one will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, but we can collect clues about why it will do so eventually. While the adulation of the activists who cheered his speech looked genuine, many of the MPs present were faking it.
Public patience will wear thin and then snap. In furtive corners of the conference, Tory MPs could be found debating whether the bubble will burst before or after the next election. The public will turn against him one day, as they do on all leaders, and then his MPs will do the same. For the cult worships only an extremely flawed parcel of mortal flesh who is much better at cracking jokes than he is at cracking governing.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
Yes. An arrangement that while nice to have benefits them more than us, since we are net importers and they are net exporters. What of it?
They are 27 individual countries that export into the one market. We are one country that exports into one Single Market. A trade war hurts us more than it hurts them.
There is no argument with someone who believes that Portugal stands to lose more from its goods attracting a tariff on entering the UK market than the UK does from having tariffs attached to its exports entering the Single Market. If you think that so be it!
Portugal is a net exporter to the UK.
The UK is a net importer from Portugal.
The UK is a minor part of the overall Portuguese export market. The single market is our biggest export market by a country mile. You can pretend otherwise, Phil, but that doesn't make it any less true.
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
Edit: and Von Spee was one of the German casualties.
Drachinfel's done something on that battle recently.
The sad thing is that, after his brilliant victory at the Battle of Coronel, von Spee pretty much knew he and his ships were done for. They'd used up half of their ammunition, were short on coal, and unless they were very lucky, were going to come up against more British ships.
But how different the Battle of Coronel might have been if the Canopus's chief engineer hadn't been (ahem) mentally unstable...
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
What he is clearly better at understanding than yourself, is what might encourage people to lend their vote to Labour, move from Tory to LibDem, or not vote at all. It is only these three things that can result in a Labour election victory.
As you are an apologist for a man that was an apologist for anti-Semites and probably is an anti-Semite (based on evidence) and who was/is totally unsuitable to lead a dog, let alone a party or a nation, I think I might take TSE's views a little more seriously than yours.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
It was a red line for GB and tge EU accepted that
The UK reluctantly accepted it for NI based on certain assurances (which essentially meant tge ECj’s role would be of limited duration). The EU has not fulfilled its assurances and therefore the protocol has not worked.
The protocol is therefore being revisited. If we are looking for a permanent solution then the ECJ is a red line
There’s no bad faith
That is delicious, Charles. Good luck with it! The CJEU has played absolutely no role up to now in Northern Ireland. Not a single case has been referred to it. Your sophistry may play well in some well heated drawing rooms this winter, but those who actually have to live with the consequences of the UK government's bad faith will perhaps be less forgiving.
The case numbers is the wrong metric to be looking at because it’s a new system.
When you are setting up long term institutional structures these things matter.
That’s why the US, for example, always insists on its courts having primacy eg in the recent US-Canadian ISDS case on GMO food
Yes, it's a new system and we did not do what the US does. We agreed something else. There are no provisions in the protocol for its renegotiation. We agreed that as well.
There is a provision for its termination if it is straining the peace settlement.
The UK is saying that it needs to be fixed or Article 16 will be triggered
The CJEU's remit is not straining the peace settlement. Triggering Article 16 on that basis would be a definitive demonstration of bad faith.
Get the Unionists to confirm that.
If they do, fair enough.
I am old enough to remember when you used to claim that the unionists should not have a veto over the protocol and that it should be for the majority of people in Northern Ireland to decide.
Well the unionists have escalated it to the point that its changed. They are the ones threatening peace, so if you want peace they need to be satisfied.
I also said the original negotiations should have included all stakeholders like the DUP, Sinn Fein etc in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you have changed your argument because your previous one doesn't work anymore!
I never cared for the Protocol in the first place but now the unionists are threatening peace and that threatens the Belfast Accord (GFA).
I thought protecting peace was the point of all this wasn't it, so if it is then you need to satisfy the Unionists so they remain peaceful. If you don't the Protocol was pointless so scrap it.
When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?
You proclaimed the protocol a triumph. You now believe it should be abandoned because a minority is threatening violence to override the wishes of the majority.
It was a triumph. It was in fact a far bigger triumph than I realised in the first place.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop. Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Yep, we have brilliantly put ourselves in a position where we face the prospect of a trade war with our biggest source of imports and exports. It's an absolute triumph.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Not at all. The NI MPs in Westminster have almost unanimously said they oppose the Protocol and want it replacing and would be happy to see A16 invoked.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
Same thing.
Sophistry - The Northern Ireland assembly represents the views of the people of Northern Ireland. That is also explicitly recognised in the protocol.
Parliament represents the UK and the NI representatives in Parliament have advocated for A16 to be invoked unless their concerns are met.
Are you saying the UK government should ignore the NI representatives in the UK Parliament that they elected?
Sophistry, Phil. The protocol makes clear that the Northern Ireland assembly is the representative body of the people of Northern Ireland. It is via assembly elections that the people there signal their approval or otherwise of the protocol. You pretending otherwise doesn't make it any less true.
You're wrong. That's not what it says.
"If the application of this Protocol leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the Union or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate safeguard measures"
The [European] Union or United Kingdom. The Assembly isn't even mentioned. The UK is entitled to take into account the views of all stakeholders into account including of course the MPs the voters of Northern Ireland elected.
So quick question. Has the implementation of the Protocol led to any "serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade"?
Any difficulties or any diversion of trade? Yes or no?
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I see, too, that Isabel Oakeshott is suggesting that a shortage of toys in December is to be welcomed so we have more time to focus on the real message of Christmas.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
The only reason you claim ‘you are being proved right’ is because you have refused to engage with any actual evidence, which unfortunately for you happens to demonstrate you are wrong. I appreciate this makes it easier for you to believe you’re right.
I’m intrigued about your username in light of this. Are you a member of the Richard III society by any chance?
This is what I predicted a decade ago:
1) London wants more infrastructure spending
2) The southern part of HS2 benefits London the northern parts don't
3) HS2 would be sold as benefitting the North
4) Construction would begin in London so London gets the benefits it wanted
5) Costs would rise and there would be years of delays
6) Other transport improvements in the North would be stopped as money is spent on HS2
7) Costs would rise more and yet more delays
8) A financial crisis would occur - I assumed after a recession didn't expect covid
9) Cutbacks in the northern parts of HS2 would happen
And so it came to pass.
There is no real benefit for London for HS2 south. To get to London you have to get to Birmingham first which mitigates any benefits.
If the only bit that is built is what is going to be built it’s a complete and utter waste of money that sadly doesn’t solve or fix anything.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
The EU never really cared that much about the Belfast Agreement - it was mainly leverage over the UK:
Good thread. It does raise the Q of why it takes this long for the EU to engage properly like this, given this is v similar to a UK idea dismissed as unworkable before Brexit. In my view Brussels has been appallingly complacent about the political consequence of strict E-W checks
The fact that the UK government has made the continuing remit of the CJEU in Northern Ireland a red line is definitive proof that it negotiated the protocol in bad faith and lied when it sold it as a triumph to the electorate. We will all end up paying a price for that.
You lot keep like to moan about nonsense like "bad faith". There is no "faith" in international relations, there is only realpolitik.
Where was the good faith in Barnier and co weaponising Northern Ireland to further their own agenda?
What's done is done, what needs to be done will be.
"Faith" is for Sunday School not international relations.
Good luck with that, Philip. We are concerned precisely because we understand exactly what the realpolitik consequences will be of the UK having negotiated an international agreement in bad faith. Unlike you, we understand that we need them a whole lot more than they need us.
That's the same lie you lot have been sharing for five years and like a vampire at sunrise its turned to dust now.
The USA doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they just don't want violence in Northern Ireland that's all they care about. Australia doesn't care if the Protocol gets implemented in the way you want, they have bigger fish to fry. Japan and the rest of the world don't care either. Its none of their business.
Brussels care but they're a party to the dispute and we hold all the cards. They can't force us to implement it the way they want, and we can implement Article 16, so they're desperate for a resolution.
Yep, you have no notion of realpolitik. You think that the UK can do whatever it wants but that the EU can't. Good luck with that.
They can do whatever they like, that they have the power to do.
What they don't have the power to do is to compel the UK to implement the Protocol in the way they wanted.
Oh well. What a shame.
They absolutely don't have that power. But they do have the power to create consequences for not implementing it. Welcome to realpolitik, Phil.
Ooh this is fun. It is October, time for telling spooky stories of things that go bump in the night.
Come on MJ, be a Thriller and tell me what "consequences" we can expect. 👻
You understand, don't you, that we currently have a free trade agreement with the EU that means no tariffs are levied on UK goods entering the Single Market?
Yes. An arrangement that while nice to have benefits them more than us, since we are net importers and they are net exporters. What of it?
They are 27 individual countries that export into the one market. We are one country that exports into one Single Market. A trade war hurts us more than it hurts them.
There is no argument with someone who believes that Portugal stands to lose more from its goods attracting a tariff on entering the UK market than the UK does from having tariffs attached to its exports entering the Single Market. If you think that so be it!
Portugal is a net exporter to the UK.
The UK is a net importer from Portugal.
The UK is a minor part of the overall Portuguese export market. The single market is our biggest export market by a country mile. You can pretend otherwise, Phil, but that doesn't make it any less true.
The UK imports far more from the Single Market than we export.
Almost every single country in the EU exports more to the UK than they import.
So almost every single country in the EU is a net exporter. Your attempts to diminish that don't hold any water.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
I see, too, that Isabel Oakeshott is suggesting that a shortage of toys in December is to be welcomed so we have more time to focus on the real message of Christmas.
The real message is to knock up somebody’s wife and then blame it on the Holy Spirit.
I see, too, that Isabel Oakeshott is suggesting that a shortage of toys in December is to be welcomed so we have more time to focus on the real message of Christmas.
Is that listening to Slade or having arguments with your family?
On Topic Man who has never voted Labour in his life thinks Labour leader that in 2017 produced the biggest increase in vote share since WW2 left a toxic legacy
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
You keep repeating this bollox, but bollox it is. Corbyn fought two general elections, and Labour recorded two of its lowest ever seat totals.*
* Explanatory Note: In the UK, parties can form governments if they win a majority of the seats. Corbyn’s Labour won 262 seats in 2017, and a lot fewer in 2019. At both elections the winning post was 326 seats.
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
It is also a category error to think that centrists want boring steady as she goes stuff. I am very much a centrist in favour of radical change. I am just happy picking from the rights toolbox or the lefts toolbox pragmatically on a case by case basis.
Yes, that's fine, and it's what Tony did, which is why I supported him. We shouldn't spend too much time debating what we mean by "centrist", I suppose - what I'm saying is that people want someone who is both interesting and safe. As HYUFD observes, it's half the battle not to get people out in droves to stop you (which is what happened in 2019, not so much in 2017), but you do also need to get your own supporters out. The right balance is to have a couple of well-defined proposals which sound attractive and new and mildly controversial but are not so far-reaching as to call everything into question.
In 1997 the Minimum Wage was a good example: concrete and specific, and radical enough to get a Tory campaign against it, but not sounding actually dangerous to the average voter. Wilson's observation that Labour is best led from the left is relevant here - you need the credibility that you're actually going to make a difference, coupled with the credibility not to be a bull in a china shop.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
I will ytake that as you don’t have a valid argument so will continue by sticking my fingers in my ears.
I'm dealing with reality not theoretical arguments.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
More evidence of how the human race was better off without social media. If he'd said the same thing in a pub or bar at 10:30pm it wouldn't have got him into anything like the same trouble.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
Falklands -- has no-one seen the old war film, The Battle of the River Plate? The one where the tension is not in the battle scenes but the diplomatic ruses first to get the Graf Spee out of Uruguay and then to keep her in while Royal Naval support could gather from, inter alia, Falklands!
There was a Battle of the Falklands in WWI which killed more people in an afternoon than died in the entire Falklands war.
Yes, the Japanese lost 117 men compared to the Russian's 5,045, so that ratio is less favourable. But the Japanese sunk 6 battleships for the loss of three small torpedo boats. And won the war.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I keep on telling you grammar and punctuation are very important.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
More evidence of how the human race was better off without social media. If he'd said the same thing in a pub at 10:30pm it wouldn't have got him into anything like the same trouble.
I wouldn't say we'd be better off without it.
But it really should come with a warning that use can be detrimental as well as beneficial.
I see, too, that Isabel Oakeshott is suggesting that a shortage of toys in December is to be welcomed so we have more time to focus on the real message of Christmas.
Is that listening to Slade or having arguments with your family?
Watching Christmas movies - like Die Hard - while eating chocolate oranges and knitting a jumper with British wool.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I am in full agreement with @Nigel_Foremain in respect of Scots independence debate and maybe you should condemn Sturgeon's appalling remarks this week
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
A free willie being one of the prime minister's problems, ironically.
Yesterday I decided to put away the garden furniture and the rotary washing line for winter. Today, beautiful sunshine and I have had to fetch the washing line back out of the garage. I can't be bothered to fetch any of the furniture back out, mind.
I was struck watching Blair & Brown how much time Blair spent smiling, especially in his early career. A constant broad grin.
That must have sent a strong subliminal message to voters. This chap is enjoying himself, he likes Britain, he is optimistic about the future. Let’s follow him. Brown on the other hand was forever frowning.
Keir is not a smiler. He looks miserable. Corbyn was worse: not just miserable but angry. I’m not sure smiling is an absolute prerequisite for success, after all Merkel is hardly full of cheer most of the time and Putin isn’t the Cheshire Cat, but looking miserable can’t be a net benefit.
When Brown tried smiling he looked like Malvolio in his yellow stockings.
"British author Sebastian Faulks says he'll no longer physically describe female characters in his novels - after he was criticised for doing so in a previous book.
Discussing writing female characters as a white male, the Birdsong writer, 68, says he'll leave it to readers to decide what the women in his books look like, telling The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival he felt 'liberated' after the decision. However, fellow authors Dawn French and 2019 Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo said the notion that writers can't write about something they don't know was 'ridiculous'. "
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
It is also a category error to think that centrists want boring steady as she goes stuff. I am very much a centrist in favour of radical change. I am just happy picking from the rights toolbox or the lefts toolbox pragmatically on a case by case basis.
Yes, that's fine, and it's what Tony did, which is why I supported him. We shouldn't spend too much time debating what we mean by "centrist", I suppose - what I'm saying is that people want someone who is both interesting and safe. As HYUFD observes, it's half the battle not to get people out in droves to stop you (which is what happened in 2019, not so much in 2017), but you do also need to get your own supporters out. The right balance is to have a couple of well-defined proposals which sound attractive and new and mildly controversial but are not so far-reaching as to call everything into question.
In 1997 the Minimum Wage was a good example: concrete and specific, and radical enough to get a Tory campaign against it, but not sounding actually dangerous to the average voter. Wilson's observation that Labour is best led from the left is relevant here - you need the credibility that you're actually going to make a difference, coupled with the credibility not to be a bull in a china shop.
I'd say that Labour does best on 'fairness' and the Conservatives on 'aspiration'.
With the sweet spots being when Labour does fairness without being un-aspirational and the Conservatives aspirational without being un-fair.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
Not sure I understand this. I never had a "Nan", I had a Granny and while she was pretty fearsome, she was actually pretty competent.
With respect to the actual point, Nicola is indeed very annoying, but it is noticeable that health is a devolved matter and yet by international comparison she has done very badly. I am not sure I can be bothered to crunch comparatives, but I think she/Scotland has done worse than England. No doubt it is the fault of the English in some way
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I am in full agreement with @Nigel_Foremain in respect of Scots independence debate and maybe you should condemn Sturgeon's appalling remarks this week
I’m in agreement with that PB guy who was recently saying folk who don’t live in Wales and don’t know much about Welsh politics should stop spouting barely informed shite (I paraphrase) about them.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
The only reason you claim ‘you are being proved right’ is because you have refused to engage with any actual evidence, which unfortunately for you happens to demonstrate you are wrong. I appreciate this makes it easier for you to believe you’re right.
I’m intrigued about your username in light of this. Are you a member of the Richard III society by any chance?
This is what I predicted a decade ago:
1) London wants more infrastructure spending
2) The southern part of HS2 benefits London the northern parts don't
3) HS2 would be sold as benefitting the North
4) Construction would begin in London so London gets the benefits it wanted
5) Costs would rise and there would be years of delays
6) Other transport improvements in the North would be stopped as money is spent on HS2
7) Costs would rise more and yet more delays
8) A financial crisis would occur - I assumed after a recession didn't expect covid
9) Cutbacks in the northern parts of HS2 would happen
And so it came to pass.
But London doesn’t benefit from HS2. If it did, it would have been built by now. Like Crossrail.*
It’s Londoners that are constantly objecting to it, not northerners who want it built. The southern part doesn’t benefit London at all because the extra capacity will be used for semi fast services in from the Midlands. In fact, the extensive building works in and around London make it definitely a net loser (why do you suppose the link to HS1 was scrapped? Why do you suppose there are ongoing efforts to downgrade the number of platforms at Euston)?
Similarly, no transport projects have been abandoned because of it. The only major one that was downgraded was the MML electrification and that was for a whole host of reasons.
So why was it sold as benefitting the north, not London? Because it does. As simple as that. We could argue about this all day (and we have been) but it won’t alter those facts merely because you don’t like them.
But why do I bother? You are not interested in facts. Only in the narrative. Would be your problem if it wasn’t for the fact that your narrative will cause real world losses to people elsewhere.
Incidentally still no answer to the question on RIII.
*OK, so crossrail has been a complete cockup, but its still been built even if it can’t be opened yet. And that was an altogether harder and less useful project than HS2 even if the headline figure was less.
The government is to offer the north and Midlands a cut-price “bare minimum” of railway upgrades despite Boris Johnson’s promise this week to “level up” the country outside London, The Independent understands.
Local transport chiefs now expect to receive a severely pared-back version of the Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme, and for ministers to effectively shelve plans for a high-speed cross-country link through the east Midlands.
The government has been drawing up plans for new connections outside London in consultation with local leaders – but insiders familiar with discussions now expect virtually every major city across the north and Midlands to be left disappointed.
Close followers of the government’s "Levelling Up agenda" may find themselves unsurprised by this news.
The problem is, if you abandon the HS2 eastern leg you also accept there can be no increase in services on the ECML, the MML or any of their feeder lines, because there simply won’t be the pathways or even the station platforms to accommodate them. As we found in Cannock when our train service to London had to be abandoned due to congestion south of Rugby which meant no train was getting to Hednesford in time to proceed to Rugeley.
And any way of increasing capacity other than HS2 will be twice as expensive yet half as effective.
(And that’s passenger services - freight will be even more constricted.)
The road haulage lobby will be happy though. Their clients at DafT came through for them when it mattered.
Yep they’ve cut the wrong half.
York and Leeds are already at capacity with zero chance of making improvements on north south routes.
I disagree about ‘the wrong half.’ It needs to be built in full. There are just as many capacity problems at Manchester.
What it does show is the power of the false narrative. The repetition of the lie that Oakervee said it would cost ‘not less than £106 billion’ when in fact he specifically said it ‘would not’ cost £106 billion, coupled with the claims about damage to woodland (inflated two hundredfold and hyperbolically compared to the loss of woodlands in the First World War) plus the mantra about ‘forty minutes faster to Birmingham’ has made it unpopular. The fact that all these claims are deliberate horseshit invented by people with axes to grind goes unnoticed.
I have to say, I’m particularly disappointed the FT has wilfully repeated so many lies. I thought until recently they were a rare surviving bastion of responsible journalism.
I told everyone ten years ago that HS2 was for the benefit of London and the big clue would be at what end they started building from.
Sigh.
Unless they built the southern leg first, there would be nowhere for the trains at the northern end to run to.
That has nothing to do with who benefits. In fact, the reason it’s under threat is because it primarily benefits the north by releasing capacity for local services (which are amply provided for in London already) and all the decision makers care about is the south.
Sigh.
There was no reason not to build from both ends.
And we've been told on this site that HS2 would allow people to commute from Stoke to Manchester.
HS2 was always based on what benefited London - on that we can agree.
It couldn't have been made any clearer by these near simultaneous announcements:
The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.
The news comes less than two months after construction officially began.
Ministers have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.
The reason it would have enabled people to commute more easily from Stoke to Manchester is because it would have freed up pathways on the WCML by taking express trains off it. Which wouldn’t have happened if there were no lines in the south to take said express trains.
As for the Euston platforms, that’s not about benefitting London. Again, it’s about where the trains go. The trains from (checks notes) the north of England.
Your final claim would tend to confirm my point, that the DFT don’t approve projects that don’t benefit London. Their obstruction, for that reason, is why it’s taken 25 years even to start digging.
So again, you seem to be wilfully missing the point. HS2 has had to struggle to survive because it has a limited benefit to London. Therefore, not only do we not agree but we’re arguing diametrically opposite points.
HS2 expands the London commuter belt and gets a fortune spent on London infrastructure.
It benefits London first and most.
The cunning thing about HS2 is that it has been sold as a benefit to the North when in reality it has always been about benefiting London.
Sadly people like yourself have been the useful idiots for this.
It really doesn’t. It expands the capacity of lines in the north and midlands by providing alternative routes for the fast expresses to London. Why do you suppose all the lies you have bought on the subject come from southerners - Joe Rukin, Chris Packham and the Treasury?
It’s an amusing irony though that you accuse me of being a useful idiot when every word you have typed this morning has been wrong and based on anti-HS2 campaigning.
Blah and blah.
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
I will ytake that as you don’t have a valid argument so will continue by sticking my fingers in my ears.
I'm dealing with reality not theoretical arguments.
Nope, you are missing a fundamental point. outside of Crewe HS2 unless it's built in full probably helps no-one get to London any quicker. In Birmingham you somehow have to get to a different station to catch the train as Birmingham New Street was / is full and doesn't have any spare land because Network Rail sold it during their Trains are a blooming inconvenience phase.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I am in full agreement with @Nigel_Foremain in respect of Scots independence debate and maybe you should condemn Sturgeon's appalling remarks this week
I’m in agreement with that PB guy who was recently saying folk who don’t live in Wales and don’t know much about Welsh politics should stop spouting barely informed shite (I paraphrase) about them.
I expect my wife has as much a claim to her Scots heritage going back generations as you have, and you may not like the debate but the fact is Sturgeons comments this week on any level, inside or outside Scotland, should be comprehensively condemned
I cannot even start to tell you how much she disgusts my wife
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
Not sure I understand this. I never had a "Nan", I had a Granny and while she was pretty fearsome, she was actually pretty competent.
With respect to the actual point, Nicola is indeed very annoying, but it is noticeable that health is a devolved matter and yet by international comparison she has done very badly. I am not sure I can be bothered to crunch comparatives, but I think she/Scotland has done worse than England. No doubt it is the fault of the English in some way
‘I am not sure I can be bothered to crunch comparatives’
It’s that kind of fact based analysis that makes PB indispensable.
"British author Sebastian Faulks says he'll no longer physically describe female characters in his novels - after he was criticised for doing so in a previous book.
Discussing writing female characters as a white male, the Birdsong writer, 68, says he'll leave it to readers to decide what the women in his books look like, telling The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival he felt 'liberated' after the decision. However, fellow authors Dawn French and 2019 Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo said the notion that writers can't write about something they don't know was 'ridiculous'. "
Although some of the criticism can be a little unfair. If you are writing a man who is a MCP, then the character might think of women in certain ways that are not the author's viewpoint.
I've seen it the other way, too: women writing men very badly.
To win a landslide and win a majority in England Labour probably do win another charismatic and centrist Blair like leader. The Blair and Brown: the New Labour Revolution which started last Monday and continues tomorrow on BBC2 at 9pm is good on showing how ruthless Blair was in changing Labour's image and policies to appeal to Middle England.
However while Labour has near zero chance of winning a majority at the next general election, Starmer has significantly higher chance of getting a hung parliament and becoming PM with SNP and LD support.
Remember the last leader to take Labour into power before Blair, Harold Wilson in February 1974 and 1964, lost in England to Home and Heath respectively. Wilson won those elections by a majority of just 4 in 1964 and by winning most seats in a hung parliament in February 1974 thanks to Labour winning a majority of seats in Scotland and Wales. So again it could be Scottish and Welsh MPs who could put Labour into power again, only this time the Scottish MPs would be SNP not Labour
It's probably a category error to think that Labour especially needs a centrist - we think in terms of left-right spectrums but most people are far more steered by gut feeling that X sounds interesting, dynamic yet safe and Y doesn't. You need some interesting stuff (which will tend not to be centrist "steady as she goes" policies) to get to the base 30%, and then you need to be sufficiently unscary to get another 5-10%. Every Labour leader will get hit by the tabloids on something so you shouldn't be paranoid about that, but you do need a generally reassuring approach.
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
It is also a category error to think that centrists want boring steady as she goes stuff. I am very much a centrist in favour of radical change. I am just happy picking from the rights toolbox or the lefts toolbox pragmatically on a case by case basis.
Wilson's observation that Labour is best led from the left is relevant here - you need the credibility that you're actually going to make a difference, coupled with the credibility not to be a bull in a china shop.
Left and right are difficult measures at the moment because so much else is drowning out political discourse, and recent Tory economic policy for better or worse is not viewed as obviously right wing out in the country. Nor for that matter - EU shenanigans aside - is their foreign policy or their approach to the environment. The thing that is most visibly and audibly right wing is the culture war stuff and the antagonistic attitude to the EU.
I don’t think it matters whether the Labour leader is truly centrist or (soft) left. They need to be interesting, likeable, non-scary, and with some form of concrete policy programme. They also really need to lose their sanctimonious outriders who are so offputting to so many voters. They’re as damaging to prospects among the floating voters as the hang em and flog em brigade are on the Tory fringes. BJO is a living example - telling everyone else they’re stupid/evil unless they get with the programme just doesn’t help.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I am in full agreement with @Nigel_Foremain in respect of Scots independence debate and maybe you should condemn Sturgeon's appalling remarks this week
I’m in agreement with that PB guy who was recently saying folk who don’t live in Wales and don’t know much about Welsh politics should stop spouting barely informed shite (I paraphrase) about them.
That is because as a Nationalist you are very parochial and narrow minded, and generally spout uninformed shite, even, about your own region.
If this is the case, though and we follow your twisted logic, none of us should comment on any politics except that that related to our region. We cannot comment on Trump in the US, the problems the EU is having with Poland, or China, or India, because we don't live in those countries. @StuartDickson should not comment on Scotland because he does not live there. @Sandpit should not comment on UK politics because he does not live here.
“You know you have fucked up on an epic scale when Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury are united in condemning you,” an EU source conceded of the extraordinary events that soon transpired.
You know what, though.
The EU fucked up with vaccines. But then they got it together.
You know what, though.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
How is the SNP government doing in fighting the plague? Any better than rUK? Bit worse? How embarrassing for you. Sturgeon is even shitter than Boris Johnson for all her bluster.
I don’t think that’s true.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
I thought Alex Salmond took that prize though I have not heard even Alex Salmond seeking the deaths of people to gain a political ambition
That’s some claim you are making against @Nigel_Foremain’s nan. Any evidence to back it up?
I am in full agreement with @Nigel_Foremain in respect of Scots independence debate and maybe you should condemn Sturgeon's appalling remarks this week
I’m in agreement with that PB guy who was recently saying folk who don’t live in Wales and don’t know much about Welsh politics should stop spouting barely informed shite (I paraphrase) about them.
I expect my wife has as much a claim to her Scots heritage going back generations as you have, and you may not like the debate but the fact is Sturgeons comments this week on a any level, inside or outside Scotland, should be comprehensively condemned
I cannot even start to tell you how much she disgusts my wife
Big G and his missus will not be giving their votes to StURgeOn and the SNP. Tipping point!
Comments
I used to work in a pit village near Pontefract in the 1990s. An awful lot of European Social Fund money had been thrown at these places and to little avail. Light industrial units, water parks. We relocated a light engineering company from Wakefield, half a dozen miles away. The rent and rates were cheaper but exactly the same people worked there who had worked at Horbury Junction. So even if Johnson has the will and pockets to level these places up, I am sceptical as to how it will work.
Equally, here in South Wales. Social Fund money brought the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Bosch and Ford to the M4 corridor. Once the money stopped, so did the interest.Oh and we have good communication links with London and the Midlands.
And that isn’t meant as a dig, I could equally complain about getting to the seafront at South Shields or Whitley Bay.
Wandered into the town afterwards. The area near the harbour is like a lot of similar declining harbour areas which haven't yet had the magic Liverpool/Hamburg/Atlanta revamp - good for fast food and pubs, otherwise a bit depressed. But like a lot of places with a poor reputation (e.g. the Glasgow tenements) a lot better than you'd think, and as Mark found, people are normally decent enough most of the time wherever you go unless you go out of your way to wind them up.
It didn't cover Britain which makes it infinitely better than the backstop.
Plus it had an option for NI voters to get out of it by voting.
What I didn't realise at the time was the significance of A16. Which is a second way for NI to get out of it. Even better, more choice! Even better A16 only requires unilateral action from the UK government.
So yes it was a stunning triumph. A bigger triumph than I thought.
Running fast and slow trains on the same track really does mess up capacity. You end up with say 12 trains an hour on the ECML when you could easily run 18 or 24 an hour if they all move at the same speed.
And that’s before you look at the 24 trains an hour that could be running on HS2.
The UK got it together with vaccines. But then they fucked up everything else.
All eight of us got through in no time at all, if we didn't have to wear the stupid masks it would have been the old normal on arrival. I very much look forwards to the day that we get rid of them completely in airports and on planes. One airline needs to just go for it and say vaccines are mandatory and masks aren't. I can't imagine having to wear it for a long haul flight and currently it's putting me and my wife off going to Thailand.
It was intended to be replaced but no progress has been made towards the envisaged scheme that would replace it, so you can question whether it is still suitable.
The entire GFA concept was built on buy-in from both the nationalist and the unionist communities. I am saddened that you no longer think this is important.
But beyond your trolling, what you are actually now saying is that instead of listening to the majority in Northern Ireland, the UK government should act in cahoots with a minority that is threatening violence if it does not get its way. And you claim to be a democrat :-D
Endless words yet I'm the one being proven right.
https://twitter.com/tomdavidson09/status/1446975952928624642?s=21
I’m intrigued about your username in light of this. Are you a member of the Richard III society by any chance?
Buy-in from the representatives of both communities
Do you ever take a step back to think about where your monomania has taken you?
Starmer is betting the farm on the Rawnsley hypothesis that people will tire of Boris's antics and look for a sober, serious leader. That may be correct, but I think we do need a bit more sparkle to get the vote out.
https://twitter.com/SundayTimesScot/status/1447093121116934150?s=20
The fact is no 10 signed an agreement they never had any intention of implementing, and have made no effort to make the protocol work .
The ECJ issue was nowhere to be seen earlier in the year , this has appeared because Frost and Johnson want to keep the UK in a constant war of words with the EU .
The biggest loser if this ends up in a trade war will be the UK , both sides will be harmed but facts matter . The EU is less reliant on exports to the UK than the other way round .
Any Leaver arguing otherwise just needs to look at official government data !
How much that is a fundamental change or merely a displacement of economic activity / housing desirability I'm not sure.
That's democracy. I advocate that the SNP should have a second independence referendum since they won the election.
Well the DUP have a mandate to oppose the Protocol and back A16 since they represent NI in Parliament.
Same thing.
Invoking Article 16 is implementing the deal in good faith. That's why the Article is there in the first place.
No international law is broken if an article of a treaty gets invoked for the literal reasons it was written.
His toxic divisive useless nonentity of a replacement is blame free
As I say man who knows nothing about what inspires people to vote Labour
Are you saying the UK government should ignore the NI representatives in the UK Parliament that they elected?
There is no argument with someone who believes that Portugal stands to lose more from its goods attracting a tariff on entering the UK market than the UK does from having tariffs attached to its exports entering the Single Market. If you think that so be it!
These are government figures so the mantra the “ UK holds all the cards “ is nonsense .
The sad thing is that, after his brilliant victory at the Battle of Coronel, von Spee pretty much knew he and his ships were done for. They'd used up half of their ammunition, were short on coal, and unless they were very lucky, were going to come up against more British ships.
But how different the Battle of Coronel might have been if the Canopus's chief engineer hadn't been (ahem) mentally unstable...
Drachinfel's vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-RG0NtlGP8
@JohnRentoul
·
1h
Today is the 47th anniversary of the last time a Labour leader other than Blair won a general election for Labour HT
@TSEofPB
Unfortunately for Labour, so does Starmer, because he is seen as as being a metropolitan woke crusader regardless of what he says in public (in this regards Blair doesn't help - for a large section of the population, he is seen as a glib charlatan who pulled the wool over their eyes).
However, when it comes to the scariness factor, Labour has a much bigger problem in that large chunks of the electorate are scared by them - maybe not so much Starmer but the MPs and activist base. They fear (probably rightly) that a PM Starmer would cave into the woke warrior faction and that, if you are in an 'unfavoured' (i.e. white and not an urban graduate working in the public sector and / or favoured professions such as law) category, you will get discriminated against. For many people, a Labour Government would mean 4-5 years of relentless wokedom with attempts to tied us effectively back to the EU.
One other big problem for Labour which wasn't an issue for Blair in 1997 - the rise of social media. If Labour wants to get elected, the best thing it can do is put the woke stuff to bed, focus on the bread and butter issues and come up with some imaginative solutions. Unfortunately that is almost impossible in this day and age. There is no way Labour now would be able to control its internal messaging as Blair and Campbell did for the first several years.
A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.
Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.
“Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!” the post read.
There is a suggestion the NSW Central Coast realtor meant to have an apostrophe after the word employee and was only referring to his experience.
He says the post, written about 10.30pm, was deleted within 12 hours and wasn’t capable of defaming the people as claimed.
The legal costs and court resources required to determine the claim would also be out of all proportion to the interest at stake, he claimed.
But the NSW district court last week turned down his application to dismiss, pointing to the seriousness of the claims in the post and finding the alleged defamatory meanings reasonably capable of being conveyed.
Judge Judith Gibson said the difficulty for Zadravic was the use of employees in the plural as it suggests “a systematic pattern of conduct”.
“To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate,” she said on Thursday.
She heard the estimated cost of the trial was $160,000, rising to $250,000 if senior counsel was retained.
But it wasn’t relevant that those costs far exceeded the potential award of damages.
“I agree this is a matter for concern but, unlike other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Australian legislators have shied away from any inquiries or research projects into defamation costs in this country, so this is unlikely to change at any stage in the future,” Gibson said.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/oct/10/missing-apostrophe-in-facebook-post-lands-nsw-real-estate-agent-in-legal-hot-water?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Still he’s more fortunate than Roger Casement.
1) London wants more infrastructure spending
2) The southern part of HS2 benefits London the northern parts don't
3) HS2 would be sold as benefitting the North
4) Construction would begin in London so London gets the benefits it wanted
5) Costs would rise and there would be years of delays
6) Other transport improvements in the North would be stopped as money is spent on HS2
7) Costs would rise more and yet more delays
8) A financial crisis would occur - I assumed after a recession didn't expect covid
9) Cutbacks in the northern parts of HS2 would happen
And so it came to pass.
That must have sent a strong subliminal message to voters. This chap is enjoying himself, he likes Britain, he is optimistic about the future. Let’s follow him. Brown on the other hand was forever frowning.
Keir is not a smiler. He looks miserable. Corbyn was worse: not just miserable but angry. I’m not sure smiling is an absolute prerequisite for success, after all Merkel is hardly full of cheer most of the time and Putin isn’t the Cheshire Cat, but looking miserable can’t be a net benefit.
The UK is a net importer from Portugal.
That said, Gordon Brown was a reasoned decision compared to putting Mr. Thicky in charge. It is extraordinary that someone who used to be a Labour MP, so therefore should be politically informed, can be so politically deluded.
In thrall to one capricious character with few deep beliefs, the Tories are abandoning once-cherished convictions and trashing traditional allies.
The Boris cult involves human sacrifice. We were witnesses to the humiliating abasement of his cabinet colleagues, the mere mortals who supposedly run important departments. I’ve been present at Tory conferences since the mid-1980s. The leader has always been top of the bill, but there were opportunities for the supporting acts to share the spotlight. Those of the cabinet who were allowed to speak – many of them weren’t even given that courtesy – were permitted only a truncated time in a small auditorium with awful acoustics.
The prime minister’s speech was a breathless and jumbled hurtle through slogans, wordplay, boasts, metaphors and jokes, jokes and more jokes. Some of them were very good, but never before have I heard a leader’s speech in which virtually every other sentence was a punchline in search of a guffaw.
You would not know that there are queues for petrol, bare supermarket shelves, surging energy prices, welfare cuts and looming tax rises from his breezy boosterism. It is in the nature of cults that they are detached from reality. I asked one senior Tory whether he was any the wiser about what Johnsonism amounted to. He sighed: “Surely we have got to the point where we realise there isn’t such a thing as Johnsonism. It is whatever works for him on the day.”
There are consequences from putting a party in such thrall to one mercurial personality. The American Republicans discovered that when their party fell into the hands of Donald Trump, who proceeded to trash many of their previously cherished principles. Something similar, if not yet quite so dramatic, is happening to the Conservatives. They used to be the party of business and farmers. If they were anything, they were that. Not any more. Mr Johnson flippantly shrugs at the travails of farmers and attacks business because he thinks that is to his advantage at this particular time.
Something we know about cults is that they tend to end badly. We cannot say with certainty when this one will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, but we can collect clues about why it will do so eventually. While the adulation of the activists who cheered his speech looked genuine, many of the MPs present were faking it.
Public patience will wear thin and then snap. In furtive corners of the conference, Tory MPs could be found debating whether the bubble will burst before or after the next election. The public will turn against him one day, as they do on all leaders, and then his MPs will do the same. For the cult worships only an extremely flawed parcel of mortal flesh who is much better at cracking jokes than he is at cracking governing.
I thought he was notable for his exposure of abuses in the Congo and for being shot for gun-running from Germany to the IRA.
THIS WILL BE A MUCH NEEDED BOOST FOR OUR WOOL INDUSTRY!
https://twitter.com/gabyhinsliff/status/1447143125093437441?s=21
British killed: 10 (with 19 wounded)
German killed: 1,871 (with 215 captured)
As you are an apologist for a man that was an apologist for anti-Semites and probably is an anti-Semite (based on evidence) and who was/is totally unsuitable to lead a dog, let alone a party or a nation, I think I might take TSE's views a little more seriously than yours.
"If the application of this Protocol leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the Union or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate safeguard measures"
The [European] Union or United Kingdom. The Assembly isn't even mentioned. The UK is entitled to take into account the views of all stakeholders into account including of course the MPs the voters of Northern Ireland elected.
So quick question. Has the implementation of the Protocol led to any "serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade"?
Any difficulties or any diversion of trade? Yes or no?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jun/27/the-man-hanged-because-of-a-comma?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
If the only bit that is built is what is going to be built it’s a complete and utter waste of money that sadly doesn’t solve or fix anything.
Both battles showed how much difference technological advancement had made in only a few years.
Almost every single country in the EU exports more to the UK than they import.
So almost every single country in the EU is a net exporter. Your attempts to diminish that don't hold any water.
Might come in useful at Christmas parties.
* Explanatory Note: In the UK, parties can form governments if they win a majority of the seats. Corbyn’s Labour won 262 seats in 2017, and a lot fewer in 2019. At both elections the winning post was 326 seats.
In 1997 the Minimum Wage was a good example: concrete and specific, and radical enough to get a Tory campaign against it, but not sounding actually dangerous to the average voter. Wilson's observation that Labour is best led from the left is relevant here - you need the credibility that you're actually going to make a difference, coupled with the credibility not to be a bull in a china shop.
Nicola is annoying but not grossly incompetent like Boris.
Boris is at the very foot of the table, below your actual Nan (may she rest in peace!), and the whale they used for the 90s kid’s film, “Free Willie”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima
Yes, the Japanese lost 117 men compared to the Russian's 5,045, so that ratio is less favourable. But the Japanese sunk 6 battleships for the loss of three small torpedo boats. And won the war.
But it really should come with a warning that use can be detrimental as well as beneficial.
Yesterday I decided to put away the garden furniture and the rotary washing line for winter. Today, beautiful sunshine and I have had to fetch the washing line back out of the garage. I can't be bothered to fetch any of the furniture back out, mind.
Discussing writing female characters as a white male, the Birdsong writer, 68, says he'll leave it to readers to decide what the women in his books look like, telling The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival he felt 'liberated' after the decision. However, fellow authors Dawn French and 2019 Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo said the notion that writers can't write about something they don't know was 'ridiculous'. "
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10077177/Sebastian-Faulks-says-hes-stopped-describing-female-characters-books-fear-offending.html
With the sweet spots being when Labour does fairness without being un-aspirational and the Conservatives aspirational without being un-fair.
With respect to the actual point, Nicola is indeed very annoying, but it is noticeable that health is a devolved matter and yet by international comparison she has done very badly. I am not sure I can be bothered to crunch comparatives, but I think she/Scotland has done worse than England. No doubt it is the fault of the English in some way
It’s Londoners that are constantly objecting to it, not northerners who want it built. The southern part doesn’t benefit London at all because the extra capacity will be used for semi fast services in from the Midlands. In fact, the extensive building works in and around London make it definitely a net loser (why do you suppose the link to HS1 was scrapped? Why do you suppose there are ongoing efforts to downgrade the number of platforms at Euston)?
Similarly, no transport projects have been abandoned because of it. The only major one that was downgraded was the MML electrification and that was for a whole host of reasons.
So why was it sold as benefitting the north, not London? Because it does. As simple as that. We could argue about this all day (and we have been) but it won’t alter those facts merely because you don’t like them.
But why do I bother? You are not interested in facts. Only in the narrative. Would be your problem if it wasn’t for the fact that your narrative will cause real world losses to people elsewhere.
Incidentally still no answer to the question on RIII.
*OK, so crossrail has been a complete cockup, but its still been built even if it can’t be opened yet. And that was an altogether harder and less useful project than HS2 even if the headline figure was less.
I cannot even start to tell you how much she disgusts my wife
It’s that kind of fact based analysis that makes PB indispensable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/
Although some of the criticism can be a little unfair. If you are writing a man who is a MCP, then the character might think of women in certain ways that are not the author's viewpoint.
I've seen it the other way, too: women writing men very badly.
I don’t think it matters whether the Labour leader is truly centrist or (soft) left. They need to be interesting, likeable, non-scary, and with some form of concrete policy programme. They also really need to lose their sanctimonious outriders who are so offputting to so many voters. They’re as damaging to prospects among the floating voters as the hang em and flog em brigade are on the Tory fringes. BJO is a living example - telling everyone else they’re stupid/evil unless they get with the programme just doesn’t help.
If this is the case, though and we follow your twisted logic, none of us should comment on any politics except that that related to our region. We cannot comment on Trump in the US, the problems the EU is having with Poland, or China, or India, because we don't live in those countries. @StuartDickson should not comment on Scotland because he does not live there. @Sandpit should not comment on UK politics because he does not live here.
Tipping point!