Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
15% of those who attended the ERP events (Ascot, etc) completed the required tests.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
15% of those who attended the ERP events (Ascot, etc) completed the required tests.
Must commend the ballsiness of the paralympic ad campaign 'It's ok, you can stare'.
The one I saw went even further: "it would be rude not to stare." I thought it was a great campaign both emphasising the sport and the inclusive message they are pushing.
I am surprised how little coverage last night's ch4 documentary on covid origins has got. There wasn't anything new for those that read too much on this i.e. i knew about the seeker, about gain of function research being done at L2....but it hasn't been brought together like that in the UK mainstream media.
OK, it's boring to have to say this, but your periodic reminders-
Trying to measure smallish differences between fuzzy numbers is a mug's game. (90% of experimental physics boils down to this.)
Conservative +10 and Conservative +3 are both totally consistent with a score of C41L35 which has been the best guess for a while. That's rather worse for the government than their peak around mid May, and would give a majority that could survive by-elections but not determined rebellions.
Events take longer to move the dial than we all think. Afghanistan might be just beginning to register.
We haven't really tested "this is a terrible government but they will defend Brexit" or "maybe this Brexit is what you'd expect to come out of a labrador's bottom and needs tweaking" yet.
I was going to say that usually oppositions (like Ed Miliband's, Michael Foot's, Neil Kinnock's, John Smith's & Tony Blair's) were in front at this stage of the electoral cycle/their leadership, but the fact you mentioned "experimental physics", and make it sound like you are doling out a lesson, make me too insecure of my intellect to challenge you
Botham's appointment as trade envoy to Australia smacks of celebrity government rather than a meritocracy. A great cricketer. Also happens to be a Tory, strongly in favour of Brexit, and an ardent monarchist. He's also not very bright - good to see the government not trusting experts. Who's next - Wayne Rooney as trade envoy to France?
Apparently, the Australian government is considering appointing Shane Warne to the reciprocal position.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
15% of those who attended the ERP events (Ascot, etc) completed the required tests.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
15% of those who attended the ERP events (Ascot, etc) completed the required tests.
I am surprised how little coverage last night's ch4 documentary on covid origins has got. There wasn't anything new for those that read too much on this i.e. i knew about the seeker, about gain of function research being done at L2....but it hasn't been brought together like that in the UK mainstream media.
Must commend the ballsiness of the paralympic ad campaign 'It's ok, you can stare'.
The one I saw went even further: "it would be rude not to stare." I thought it was a great campaign both emphasising the sport and the inclusive message they are pushing.
I'm sure C4 aren't doing slogans of different politeness according to the demographics of the area. However, I'd love it if they were, and of course Romford has the most direct version.
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
This is completely insane. It's been suggested that people can do regular antibody tests instead of getting a third dose. What a waste of everyone's time and money. Just start giving them out you idiots. We have them and people want them. Fucking get on with it.
Surely there would be no reason to do tests on the whole population. Logically you do a sample and model it, if you see waning immunity in a section of the population you just give them boosters.
Presumably the combination of vaccination and boosting by mild infection will make those infections milder and milder over time. I'd probably rate my current illness 3-4 out of ten where 1 is no symptoms, 10 is death, 8-9 ICU, 6-7 is hospitalisation.
I'd hope with the combination of this infection and a second jab in about a months time my next infection if it ever happens will be in the 1-2 range.
Out of interest, given I've not actually booked my second dose, any wisdom on how long to hold off to maximise its effects? I was going to go for 10-12 weeks from the first dose as that seems optimal, but I'm wondering if having just reved my immune system up with an infection I should attempt to hold out longer.
Botham's appointment as trade envoy to Australia smacks of celebrity government rather than a meritocracy. A great cricketer. Also happens to be a Tory, strongly in favour of Brexit, and an ardent monarchist. He's also not very bright - good to see the government not trusting experts. Who's next - Wayne Rooney as trade envoy to France?
Apparently, the Australian government is considering appointing Shane Warne to the reciprocal position.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Beefy will try to hit them for 6 but Warney will bowl him through the gate. Should be a lot more interesting than normal trade talk.
Our influence over the Americans has been pretty small ever since I can remember.
Barack Obama, for one, famously treated Gordon Brown with utter contempt.
And I can't believe that Boris has less influence over his American counterpart than the alternative in 2019 would have had. Nor can I believe that Boris has less influence than SKS would have.
I wouldn't go as far as Leon in claiming that no-one gives a fuck, but this is definitely an issue in which establishment opinion differs from mainstream opinion - both in the UK and the USA. Mainstream opinion is of the view however badly the withdrawal has been managed, we shouldn't be there anyway.
I'm not necessarily identifying with mainstream opinion here - even after 20 years I'm firmly in the 'don't know' camp. But I am sure that America will do what it wants, and with America taking the path it has that the UK is firmly at the mercy of events.
That's an odd assertion. Obama's memoirs are very complimentary about Brown (unlike Sarkozy) and he clearly regrets his departure in 2010.
I'm also puzzled by your "mainstream" comment. I don't know about the US, but there was strong support for the original intervention in the poll at the weekend. Surprised me, as I thought the same as you.
Just to add on product certifications: pretty much all free trade agreements have specific provisions about the use of product standards as non tariff barriers.
If we have standards that are not subsets of FCC/CE, then people will regard those standards as NTBs.
OK, it's boring to have to say this, but your periodic reminders-
Trying to measure smallish differences between fuzzy numbers is a mug's game. (90% of experimental physics boils down to this.)
Conservative +10 and Conservative +3 are both totally consistent with a score of C41L35 which has been the best guess for a while. That's rather worse for the government than their peak around mid May, and would give a majority that could survive by-elections but not determined rebellions.
Events take longer to move the dial than we all think. Afghanistan might be just beginning to register.
We haven't really tested "this is a terrible government but they will defend Brexit" or "maybe this Brexit is what you'd expect to come out of a labrador's bottom and needs tweaking" yet.
I was going to say that usually oppositions (like Ed Miliband's, Michael Foot's, Neil Kinnock's, John Smith's & Tony Blair's) were in front at this stage of the electoral cycle/their leadership, but the fact you mentioned "experimental physics", and make it sound like you are doling out a lesson, make me too insecure of my intellect to challenge you
Prog right up your street on right now. Farage on GB News chatting to darts legend Bobby George. It's hard to watch but also hard to turn off.
I am surprised how little coverage last night's ch4 documentary on covid origins has got. There wasn't anything new for those that read too much on this i.e. i knew about the seeker, about gain of function research being done at L2....but it hasn't been brought together like that in the UK mainstream media.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Quite true.
People can indeed lie.
I always enjoy how these kind of "loopholes" are discussed as if they are shocking discoveries.
Later - head of Catholic Church’s faith clarifed. Ursine defecation near large angiosperms observed...
I usually picture the bears shitting under conifers, which are gymnosperms.
Friends at dinner on Thursday night shared an iPhone video taken from their living room of 3 Black Bear cubs playing in their yard as mommabear snoozed up a white oak. Needless to say, they did not venture outside until mommabear and troupe moved on. (This is in the westernmost part of Maryland, so west that it may as well be West Virginia).
I've had a Bear shit on my front path. Well, it was nestling in a pair of blue underpants after an Old Firm match..
Wouldn't be wearing a pair of green keks, would it?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
I am surprised how little coverage last night's ch4 documentary on covid origins has got. There wasn't anything new for those that read too much on this i.e. i knew about the seeker, about gain of function research being done at L2....but it hasn't been brought together like that in the UK mainstream media.
It's comprehensive and convincing. :Like Francis, for me it contained nothing new, but they weave together the narrative cleverly
90-99% certain it came from the lab. Anyone who says otherwise is either a Chinese shill, a contrarian, or a halfwit
Well I'm none of those things and having processed the necessary info I don't assess lab leak at anything like 90%.
What? I accept you are neither a Chinese shill, nor a contrarian, but you are most definitely a halfwit
Mr K is certainly not a halfwit. Stop being a bully Leon. You make the best of posts and the worst. You'll be a better man when you work up the courage to apologise for the worst.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Quite true.
People can indeed lie.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Apparently a major problem already in the US. No idea if it is because they went the whole autobahn thing a decade or two before the UK.
OK, it's boring to have to say this, but your periodic reminders-
Trying to measure smallish differences between fuzzy numbers is a mug's game. (90% of experimental physics boils down to this.)
Conservative +10 and Conservative +3 are both totally consistent with a score of C41L35 which has been the best guess for a while. That's rather worse for the government than their peak around mid May, and would give a majority that could survive by-elections but not determined rebellions.
Events take longer to move the dial than we all think. Afghanistan might be just beginning to register.
We haven't really tested "this is a terrible government but they will defend Brexit" or "maybe this Brexit is what you'd expect to come out of a labrador's bottom and needs tweaking" yet.
I was going to say that usually oppositions (like Ed Miliband's, Michael Foot's, Neil Kinnock's, John Smith's & Tony Blair's) were in front at this stage of the electoral cycle/their leadership, but the fact you mentioned "experimental physics", and make it sound like you are doling out a lesson, make me too insecure of my intellect to challenge you
I think you did perfectly fine at your challenge.
Since you ask- yes, any government would accept a six point lead two-to-three years out from an election. There are reasons why I think this cycle could be odd- partly Covid freezing time for 18 months, partly the Corbyn legacy, but mostly because the normal political cycle has been bashed on the head. Normally, governments do the unpopular-but-necessary stuff in Years 1 and 2, and come up with goodies for Years 3 and 4. Both Covid and Johnson's temperament have prevented the Year 1/2 bit of that, and Years 3 and 4 are likely to have fewer pre-election giveaways than normal. So less swingback than normal.
But the other thing is important. On Saturday, we had smart opponents of the government getting excited about a 39-36 poll. Today, we had smart supporters of the government getting excited about a 43-33 poll. The important thing is that there's no inconsistency between them. And if you try to calculate the change from one poll to the next, the fuzziness of the measurement is much much bigger than the sort of change in opinion you get in a week. It's a mug's game. And I've spent a lot of time bumping up against that problem, in a way that most people's professional experiences mean they haven't.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
So Lab need to gain Macclesfield to form a majority. That is an astonishingly long way away.
Fascinating to see how the electoral geography has changed though, that Bournemouth West and Macclesfield are now in the same bracket of 'pretty safe Con' as Morley and Outwood and Great Grimsby.
Labour did actually come close to winning Macclesfield at the September 1971 by election which saw the election of Nicholas Winterton. More seriously though, seats which have seen dramatic swings against Labour recently - such as Grimsby ,Morley & Outwood, Gloucester, Carlisle,Kingswood and Rossendale & Darwen - may well in reality be more winnable for the party than seats such as Wycombe which on paper are now much more marginal.It is dangerous to assume that a big swing at a particular election in a seat heralds a longterm permanent change in its natural alleigance. To the extent that the Corbyn and Brexit factors were responsible for such swings, their unwinding due to much more minor salience at future elections might bring about an above average swing back to Labour there in due course.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Apparently a major problem already in the US. No idea if it is because they went the whole autobahn thing a decade or two before the UK.
They have just spent years and millions repairing the Oldbury viaducts in south Birmingham. But because it was in a far worse state than they realised, they couldn’t repair it completely even running over time and budget by huge margins.
And there are Oldburystyle bridges - at a guess - every fifteen miles of the network?
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
The reliability of the things is a significant issue, evidently - I hadn't been up to date on it.
It's rather sad watching Botham embarrass himself by lending his reputation to this ridiculous publicity stunt particularly after his excellent work collecting money for Lymphoma and Leukemia research
The irony of the quote about Rashford staying out of politics seems to be lost on those who think this is not a ludicrous appointment.
The irony is that people like you and Roger have no idea how much respect the Ozzies have for Beefy. I think it's as good as any appointment that could have been made. The Ozzies will listen to Beefy, even if they sledge him!
After years persuading us to eat three Shredded wheat who could possibly be a better trade envoy to Australia? I heard that they tried for Natalie Portman but she'd done Dior in France so Macron got first shout
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Apparently a major problem already in the US. No idea if it is because they went the whole autobahn thing a decade or two before the UK.
They have just spent years and millions repairing the Oldbury viaducts in south Birmingham. But because it was in a far worse state than they realised, they couldn’t repair it completely even running over time and budget by huge margins.
And there are Oldburystyle bridges - at a guess - every fifteen miles of the network?
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
It's just odd, like inventing a new calendar or renaming the days of the week. Manufacturers will just see it as an added complication. Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO.
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Apparently a major problem already in the US. No idea if it is because they went the whole autobahn thing a decade or two before the UK.
They have just spent years and millions repairing the Oldbury viaducts in south Birmingham. But because it was in a far worse state than they realised, they couldn’t repair it completely even running over time and budget by huge margins.
And there are Oldburystyle bridges - at a guess - every fifteen miles of the network?
Two trillion doesn’t sound far away.
I don't think there is that much route mileage at the scale of Oldbury - IIRC it's about a mile long over a chunk of city. This was expensive to build, so they tended to only do it to hop over urban areas. The worst bit I can think of to deal with is probably going to be the M6 from the same area as Oldbury, down to Spaghetti - when they decide that's worn out, it will make the Oldbury job look like a walk in the park.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
Ireland waves from a right hand drive car.
Yes, and that's because Ireland used to be part of the UK.
The point still stands: making a car drive the other way round is certainly less efficient for manufacturers when the rest of the single market of over 400 million people does the opposite and yet, bizarrely, they cope. Same with three-pin UK plugs and our main domestic distribution voltage.
The only part of London with a definite rise in cases in the last week is Richmond, which is very wealthy. Nothing much is showing up on the lagged MSOA map so far, but the area containing Hampton Court Palace is a hotspot. Can the virus be contained in the maze?
I'm sure I remember reading about a mayor in a small city in USA who was recalled, and then re-elected, in the same election, on the basis that the first measure was if they should be recalled, and the second was a list of candidates in the event the recall was successful which, for some reason, the recalled person was permitted to be on, and as the vote was split by his opponents he was returned.
Amusingly I see from the wikipedia page on the upcoming vote that every Californian governor since the 1960s has faced recall attempts - whilst most didn't go to a vote that probably shows it is still too easy to do, and that the politial culture is messed up.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
It's just odd, like inventing a new calendar or renaming the days of the week. Manufacturers will just see it as an added complication. Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO.
Eh? Setting out own certification refine "breaches the WTO" ?
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
The Newsom recall vote will give us an interesting perspective on where America is right now.
Yes - he seems ahead but not by much. Can someone with more knowledge of Californian politics give us a summary of the pros and cons?
I don't have any special knowledge of California. but I was looking at the odds on betfair:
Yes on recall 4.0 No on recall 1.3
That seems a to indicate punters think one outcome is much more likely than the other, which seems surprising as the poles are close. The pro-recall seem to have more energy, if less money.
I don't make a lot of bets, but I'm tempted to make a small value bet on yes, but would interested in any other thoughts.
I have bet on Labour poll lead by the end of the year.
And I have laid a Tory majority.
I think the result in 2024 will fall somewhere between 2010 but in reverse and 2015 repeated. We have reached peak Tory and it is downhill from here, IMHO
It would be a welcome event. This government displays an arrogance only matched by its incompetence. They certainly need something to shake them up.
Hi Richard, hope you are well Sir - glad to see you posting more regularly.
Much like Labour, I think it would benefit the entire population long term to have Boris Johnson and this lot of Tories out. Then they can go back to being sensible again.
Evening sir and many thanks. The only thing that has been keeping me away has been sheer volume of work although sadly I think that might end soon as one of my main contracts looks like being rolled up after a merger amongst clients. Somewhat worrying but to be expected and to be honest that is one of the reasons companies have contractors so they have that flexibility. But right now I need to make sure I have everything wrapped up before the likely end of contract.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Where was the chilli 🌶 festival out of interest ? 🤔
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
This characteristically robust blog by @chrisgreybrexit is a handy and comprehensive audit of what Brexit has actually meant in practical terms since it was done*
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Well that's the thing that amuses me, so much of our motorway network dates back to the same period, and economically those are truly the arteries of the nation far more than any amount of rail or anything else.
If we'd continued that rate of investment in new motorways over the past decades we'd be in a much better position. Its ridiculous that we haven't due to an almost religious distaste of roads, cars and HGVs etc as "unclean" etc
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
Ireland waves from a right hand drive car.
How much fun will it be when the EU insists all member states drive on the right....
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Where was the chilli 🌶 festival out of interest ? 🤔
Near sturminster newton in Dorset. I gave a talk on my research.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have rail, not me, not anyone else. But the rail that is moving those containers already exists and it is 5% of all movement.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
There will probably have to be that investment in roads anyway given how many motorway bridges are about to become simultaneously life expired and will need replacing.
Apparently a major problem already in the US. No idea if it is because they went the whole autobahn thing a decade or two before the UK.
They have just spent years and millions repairing the Oldbury viaducts in south Birmingham. But because it was in a far worse state than they realised, they couldn’t repair it completely even running over time and budget by huge margins.
And there are Oldburystyle bridges - at a guess - every fifteen miles of the network?
Two trillion doesn’t sound far away.
I don't think there is that much route mileage at the scale of Oldbury - IIRC it's about a mile long over a chunk of city. This was expensive to build, so they tended to only do it to hop over urban areas. The worst bit I can think of to deal with is probably going to be the M6 from the same area as Oldbury, down to Spaghetti - when they decide that's worn out, it will make the Oldbury job look like a walk in the park.
Good news for the owners of the M6 toll mind you!
Redoing Spaghetti would not be fun! Or would be, depending upon your perspective.
When, damn it?! Must I pay for future posts to find out?
When my son was in L2 he asked him primary school teacher why the moon did not fall into the earth. Her answer was because it was heavy! At 6 my son was wanting to know if he could take anything she said seriously. I wasn't sure.
You'd have thought someone who could locate a Lagrange point would know the answer to that one.
More seriously, is "because it is heavy" such a bad answer?
Let's hope some vague semblance of sanity leaks in to government during that time and that we abandon the entire brain-dead idea of UKCA - a remarkable example of a policy with not a single merit and with massive demerits, both for our manufacturers (for whom it's just extra, completely pointless, red tape) and for consumers (for whom it will reduce choice and increase costs).
Its not lunacy. A lot of CE marks are buearcratic and hard to obtain, whilst also often failing to achieve what is intended. This is particularly true if you ever have to implement one in France, but it was getting that way in the UK too.
Certainly in my industry (I'm on the committee which develops all the guidance for my sector) quite a lot of people are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of divergence in sensible directions, now we'll have a governing body which is actually in reach.
I'm still doing EU work too - my usual Notified Body has set up a brass plate in Dublin, and changed me one off costs of about £600 to duel certificate our key paperwork, which whilst a little irritating (given its only going through the photocopier) is hardly a kings ransom.
That makes no sense. I can see an argument (you could call it 'Global Britain') for accepting CE marks AND other quality marks, which could even include our own, although we're really too small to have our own certification scheme. But there is zero, precisely zero, reason not to accept CE marks. It's just utter lunacy. It means any UK manufacturer has to get double certification if it has even the slightest wish to export, it means many international suppliers simply won't bother with the UK at all, or if they do will limit the UKCA applications to just a few product lines, which is bad for consumers, and it means UK manufacturers dependent on parts in their supply chain where the supplier can't be bothered to get UKCA certification are completely stuffed.
And what for? What exactly are the undesirable EU products we're trying to keep out?
You've turned into a rampant Remoaner.
You're like Vera Webster in Superman 3 who gets sucked in by the supercomputer and turned into a plodding cyborg.
In this particular case, @Richard_Nabavi is correct: there is no reason not to accept CE certification in the UK. If we want to have our own, separate certification, that products can adhere to to be sold, that's fine. But not accepting CE (which, by the way is accepted all over the world) strikes my as bizarre.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC - UL - CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
Ireland waves from a right hand drive car.
How much fun will it be when the EU insists all member states drive on the right....
What would be the point of a measure that effects only Ireland with no payoff save to massively inconvenience a small part of the bloc?
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
OK, it's boring to have to say this, but your periodic reminders-
Trying to measure smallish differences between fuzzy numbers is a mug's game. (90% of experimental physics boils down to this.)
Conservative +10 and Conservative +3 are both totally consistent with a score of C41L35 which has been the best guess for a while. That's rather worse for the government than their peak around mid May, and would give a majority that could survive by-elections but not determined rebellions.
Events take longer to move the dial than we all think. Afghanistan might be just beginning to register.
We haven't really tested "this is a terrible government but they will defend Brexit" or "maybe this Brexit is what you'd expect to come out of a labrador's bottom and needs tweaking" yet.
I was going to say that usually oppositions (like Ed Miliband's, Michael Foot's, Neil Kinnock's, John Smith's & Tony Blair's) were in front at this stage of the electoral cycle/their leadership, but the fact you mentioned "experimental physics", and make it sound like you are doling out a lesson, make me too insecure of my intellect to challenge you
Prog right up your street on right now. Farage on GB News chatting to darts legend Bobby George. It's hard to watch but also hard to turn off.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
It's just odd, like inventing a new calendar or renaming the days of the week. Manufacturers will just see it as an added complication. Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO.
Eh? Setting out own certification refine "breaches the WTO" ?
Example: Austria wanted to introduce new rules IIRC requiring products to show the sourece of the energy used to produce it, so consumers could choose products that used green energy, which we might think a harmless addition to consumer information. They were forced to drop the idea, because Austrian companies familiar with the scheme would have found it easier to comply with.
There is nothing to stop us introducing some new rules that British companies would find as difficult as anyone else, perhaps for some quality reason. But I'm not sure that's the idea.
Here’s one for you WFH enthusiasts. I’ve been asked to write an article on offshoring WFH jobs.
Not sure what point you're trying to make here.
I know companies who are looking at more home working, not less. Should I proclaim this as the death knell for the office?
Hardly.
Should I quake in terror at the sheer power and influence of your prose?
Nah.
I half finished that thought but realised it was going no where but Vanilla saved it so it ended up in front of another one. The articles I write are, I accept, fantastically boring and aimed largely at the HR and specialist legal press.
OK, it's boring to have to say this, but your periodic reminders-
Trying to measure smallish differences between fuzzy numbers is a mug's game. (90% of experimental physics boils down to this.)
Conservative +10 and Conservative +3 are both totally consistent with a score of C41L35 which has been the best guess for a while. That's rather worse for the government than their peak around mid May, and would give a majority that could survive by-elections but not determined rebellions.
Events take longer to move the dial than we all think. Afghanistan might be just beginning to register.
We haven't really tested "this is a terrible government but they will defend Brexit" or "maybe this Brexit is what you'd expect to come out of a labrador's bottom and needs tweaking" yet.
I was going to say that usually oppositions (like Ed Miliband's, Michael Foot's, Neil Kinnock's, John Smith's & Tony Blair's) were in front at this stage of the electoral cycle/their leadership, but the fact you mentioned "experimental physics", and make it sound like you are doling out a lesson, make me too insecure of my intellect to challenge you
I think you did perfectly fine at your challenge.
Since you ask- yes, any government would accept a six point lead two-to-three years out from an election. There are reasons why I think this cycle could be odd- partly Covid freezing time for 18 months, partly the Corbyn legacy, but mostly because the normal political cycle has been bashed on the head. Normally, governments do the unpopular-but-necessary stuff in Years 1 and 2, and come up with goodies for Years 3 and 4. Both Covid and Johnson's temperament have prevented the Year 1/2 bit of that, and Years 3 and 4 are likely to have fewer pre-election giveaways than normal. So less swingback than normal.
But the other thing is important. On Saturday, we had smart opponents of the government getting excited about a 39-36 poll. Today, we had smart supporters of the government getting excited about a 43-33 poll. The important thing is that there's no inconsistency between them. And if you try to calculate the change from one poll to the next, the fuzziness of the measurement is much much bigger than the sort of change in opinion you get in a week. It's a mug's game. And I've spent a lot of time bumping up against that problem, in a way that most people's professional experiences mean they haven't.
Locking everyone in their house and closing the pubs isn't "unpopular-but-necessary?"
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
They were designed to detect those who are currently infectious - which they are very good indeed at doing. The government administration of their use has been pretty hopeless. But their current availability is very useful if you want to avoid infecting other people at work, or at home.
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
The Newsom recall vote will give us an interesting perspective on where America is right now.
Yes - he seems ahead but not by much. Can someone with more knowledge of Californian politics give us a summary of the pros and cons?
I dunno there was a Washington Post headline from today suggesting its closer than Newsom would like, but paywalled.
I was curious what it was all about, but apparently this is standard tactics in Californian politics and this is the 7th time he's faced such a challenge! Masses of detail here:
tldr: he's made some mistakes and the GOP want to unseat him. They might succeed but probably won't - one poll suggeste dotherwise but it seems to have been an outlier.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
I have bet on Labour poll lead by the end of the year.
And I have laid a Tory majority.
I think the result in 2024 will fall somewhere between 2010 but in reverse and 2015 repeated. We have reached peak Tory and it is downhill from here, IMHO
It would be a welcome event. This government displays an arrogance only matched by its incompetence. They certainly need something to shake them up.
Hi Richard, hope you are well Sir - glad to see you posting more regularly.
Much like Labour, I think it would benefit the entire population long term to have Boris Johnson and this lot of Tories out. Then they can go back to being sensible again.
Evening sir and many thanks. The only thing that has been keeping me away has been sheer volume of work although sadly I think that might end soon as one of my main contracts looks like being rolled up after a merger amongst clients. Somewhat worrying but to be expected and to be honest that is one of the reasons companies have contractors so they have that flexibility. But right now I need to make sure I have everything wrapped up before the likely end of contract.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
85% tested positive? Edit: oh, you mean 85% hadn't been tested? My comment was only about people who test positive and go and infect people anyway.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
The reliability of the things is a significant issue, evidently - I hadn't been up to date on it.
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
The Newsom recall vote will give us an interesting perspective on where America is right now.
Yes - he seems ahead but not by much. Can someone with more knowledge of Californian politics give us a summary of the pros and cons?
I dunno there was a Washington Post headline from today suggesting its closer than Newsom would like, but paywalled.
I was curious what it was all about, but apparently this is standard tactics in Californian politics and this is the 7th time he's faced such a challenge! Masses of detail here:
tldr: he's made some mistakes and the GOP want to unseat him. They might succeed but probably won't - one poll suggeste dotherwise but it seems to have been an outlier.
The polls which suggest otherwise are pretty close though. He certainly isn't as safe as he really should be given it is California.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
85% tested positive? Edit: oh, you mean 85% hadn't been tested? My comment was only about people who test positive and go and infect people anyway.
And mine was that there is no incentive to take the test.
When people have the flu and go out and about no one has ever previously talked of them being guilty of manslaughter.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
Locking everyone in their house and closing the pubs isn't "unpopular-but-necessary?"
No, it had overwhleming public support. Odd, perhaps, but true.
I still think the lockdown in years 1-2 vs no lockdowns in years 3-4 will play out as bad stuff front loaded, with goodies near GE
The crux of the matter is Labour supporters/Boris haters have to find some excuse to be being optimistic, when the polls are worse for them at this stage than any other time in opposition since the 79s ,bar the Corbyn years. I just don’t think there is any real logic to it
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
85% tested positive? Edit: oh, you mean 85% hadn't been tested? My comment was only about people who test positive and go and infect people anyway.
And mine was that there is no incentive to take the test.
When people have the flu and go out and about no one has ever previously talked of them being guilty of manslaughter.
Indeed not. But (for example) in a month’s time my mother is due a hip operation. LFTs give me some confidence that it’s safe to carry on visiting her without jeopardising that.
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
It's just odd, like inventing a new calendar or renaming the days of the week. Manufacturers will just see it as an added complication. Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO.
Eh? Setting out own certification refine "breaches the WTO" ?
Example: Austria wanted to introduce new rules IIRC requiring products to show the sourece of the energy used to produce it, so consumers could choose products that used green energy, which we might think a harmless addition to consumer information. They were forced to drop the idea, because Austrian companies familiar with the scheme would have found it easier to comply with.
There is nothing to stop us introducing some new rules that British companies would find as difficult as anyone else, perhaps for some quality reason. But I'm not sure that's the idea.
Ah, right - so it's not breaching the WTO then. Only if it's a NTB specifically designed to make it easier for British firms to compete, and therefore protectionist.
If it's about just choosing our own certification (which it is) so anyone selling into our market needs to meet certain rules and standards then it's absolutely fine.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
The reliability of the things is a significant issue, evidently - I hadn't been up to date on it.
Which has also been calling out some so-called approved testing services, as I recall.
They are a more reliable test than PCR for whether you’re infectious.
PCR is extremely accurate (far more so than LFTs) at telling if you have any virus in your system, but that isn’t the same thing at all.
I really think too little has been made of this with PCR. As part of my leukaemia monitoring I had frequent bone marrow biopsies, which were analysed by PCR. Never returned a zero score, always some level of the relevant signal detected. There is a cut off, below which you are regarded as in molecular remission (as opposed to just symptom based). But the point is you can never get to zero. In my case people speculate about residual proteins that are not disease related. So I wonder how many positive PCR tests are actually people who are no longer ill and no longer infectious.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
I think his argument is that having our own separate self-certification is not fine.
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
It's just odd, like inventing a new calendar or renaming the days of the week. Manufacturers will just see it as an added complication. Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO.
Eh? Setting out own certification refine "breaches the WTO" ?
Example: Austria wanted to introduce new rules IIRC requiring products to show the sourece of the energy used to produce it, so consumers could choose products that used green energy, which we might think a harmless addition to consumer information. They were forced to drop the idea, because Austrian companies familiar with the scheme would have found it easier to comply with.
There is nothing to stop us introducing some new rules that British companies would find as difficult as anyone else, perhaps for some quality reason. But I'm not sure that's the idea.
Ah, right - so it's not breaching the WTO then. Only if it's a NTB specifically designed to make it easier for British firms to compete, and therefore protectionist.
If it's about just choosing our own certification (which it is) so anyone selling into our market needs to meet certain rules and standards then it's absolutely fine.
It depends - what I said was "Insofar as it provides protection, it will breach the WTO". If it's considered that it will be easier for British firms to comply, then it's an illegal NTB. If not, then it's fine.
So Lab need to gain Macclesfield to form a majority. That is an astonishingly long way away.
Fascinating to see how the electoral geography has changed though, that Bournemouth West and Macclesfield are now in the same bracket of 'pretty safe Con' as Morley and Outwood and Great Grimsby.
Labour did actually come close to winning Macclesfield at the September 1971 by election which saw the election of Nicholas Winterton. More seriously though, seats which have seen dramatic swings against Labour recently - such as Grimsby ,Morley & Outwood, Gloucester, Carlisle,Kingswood and Rossendale & Darwen - may well in reality be more winnable for the party than seats such as Wycombe which on paper are now much more marginal.It is dangerous to assume that a big swing at a particular election in a seat heralds a longterm permanent change in its natural alleigance. To the extent that the Corbyn and Brexit factors were responsible for such swings, their unwinding due to much more minor salience at future elections might bring about an above average swing back to Labour there in due course.
I don't know about that, I think we have seen a real alignment among socially conservative older voters. I do not believe Labour will win seats like Hartlepool, Grimsby, Mansfield and Bassetlaw again.
On the other hand there are still a bunch of red wall seats like Bolsover that Labour can win back if they are level pegging with the Tories nationally on a uniform swing. I don't believe differential turnout will be the same in 2023/24 as in 2019 but Starmer will struggle to exceed Kinnock's 35% based on his current performance.
On the subject of the thread I think it is impossible for Labour to get a majority in 2023/2024 and get more than 250-60 seats but there is a sort of plausible route to a Labour majority in 2028/29 if they win back 20+ seats from the SNP, seats they haven't won since 1997/2001 like Shrewsbury, Scarborough and maybe even Shapps' seat etc as well as new targets like Bournemouth, Macclesfield, Colchester etc.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
OMFG. I did not realise how badly the Dems are fucking up in California.
Newsom will probably be recalled and the Dems don't have a solid backup candidate and because California's recall law is uterly idiotic the GOP candidate had a great chance of winning.
This could lead to the Dems losing the Senate because if Feinstein drops dead the Govenor fills the post with their pick.
This is astoundingly shit politics by the stupidest party in America.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
They were designed to detect those who are currently infectious - which they are very good indeed at doing. The government administration of their use has been pretty hopeless. But their current availability is very useful if you want to avoid infecting other people at work, or at home.
Yes, quite handy for visiting grandma.
I have to do them weekly for work, and wouldn't fake them there.
I'd say my guestimate of "it came from the lab" has probably gone up from 40% to 75% after watching it.
Whatever the percentage, some people have some serious questions to answer as they haven't been telling the truth nor operating with the up most highest of standards.
But it won't happen, as scared of losing Chinese money and that they will totally withdraw from global surveillance programs.
OMFG. I did not realise how badly the Dems are fucking up in California.
Newsom will probably be recalled and the Dems don't have a solid backup candidate and because California's recall law is uterly idiotic the GOP candidate had a great chance of winning.
This could lead to the Dems losing the Senate because if Feinstein drops dead the Govenor fills the post with their pick.
This is astoundingly shit politics by the stupidest party in America.
Then the GOP just need to pick up 5 Dem House seats next year and they are back in control of Congress again
Comments
The ones I've seen have been "It's rude not to stare."
Feisty.
If you go pick up pretty much any piece of electronics sold around the world, you will find it will have three marks on the back (irrespective of where it's sold):
- FCC
- UL
- CE
There is no Canadian or Brazilian or Japanese mark, with separate standards, because everyone has negotiated mutual recognition.
I'm also puzzled by your "mainstream" comment. I don't know about the US, but there was strong support for the original intervention in the poll at the weekend. Surprised me, as I thought the same as you.
If we have standards that are not subsets of FCC/CE, then people will regard those standards as NTBs.
People can indeed lie.
I have no qualms with rail having investment, but I think it should be appropriately proportional to investment in roads and other options too. If there's £100bn for rail, there ought to be a couple of £trillion available for roads too - but there isn't, there's taxes and an absence of investment.
To put it in Parliamentary voting terms from the 2019 rail is not even half of the Lib Dems share of the vote.
Roads are more than all of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems share combined.
But just stop being a bully.
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Since you ask- yes, any government would accept a six point lead two-to-three years out from an election. There are reasons why I think this cycle could be odd- partly Covid freezing time for 18 months, partly the Corbyn legacy, but mostly because the normal political cycle has been bashed on the head. Normally, governments do the unpopular-but-necessary stuff in Years 1 and 2, and come up with goodies for Years 3 and 4. Both Covid and Johnson's temperament have prevented the Year 1/2 bit of that, and Years 3 and 4 are likely to have fewer pre-election giveaways than normal. So less swingback than normal.
But the other thing is important. On Saturday, we had smart opponents of the government getting excited about a 39-36 poll. Today, we had smart supporters of the government getting excited about a 43-33 poll. The important thing is that there's no inconsistency between them. And if you try to calculate the change from one poll to the next, the fuzziness of the measurement is much much bigger than the sort of change in opinion you get in a week. It's a mug's game. And I've spent a lot of time bumping up against that problem, in a way that most people's professional experiences mean they haven't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi
They have just spent years and millions repairing the Oldbury viaducts in south Birmingham. But because it was in a far worse state than they realised, they couldn’t repair it completely even running over time and budget by huge margins.
And there are Oldburystyle bridges - at a guess - every fifteen miles of the network?
Two trillion doesn’t sound far away.
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/how-reliable-are-lateral-flow-covid-19-tests
Which has also been calling out some so-called approved testing services, as I recall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3BtxwXymzk
We've left the single market now and, so, we will want to set our own standards for some goods.
In fact, this already happens for some items (think right-hand drive cars, where it's just us in the whole of Europe and was before we left the EU) so I don't think manufacturers will find it too difficult to manage a modest delta if we decide to diverge in some areas.
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01B2LHJU4/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
The worst bit I can think of to deal with is probably going to be the M6 from the same area as Oldbury, down to Spaghetti - when they decide that's worn out, it will make the Oldbury job look like a walk in the park.
Good news for the owners of the M6 toll mind you!
The point still stands: making a car drive the other way round is certainly less efficient for manufacturers when the rest of the single market of over 400 million people does the opposite and yet, bizarrely, they cope. Same with three-pin UK plugs and our main domestic distribution voltage.
It's a lot of fuss about nothing.
The only part of London with a definite rise in cases in the last week is Richmond, which is very wealthy. Nothing much is showing up on the lagged MSOA map so far, but the area containing Hampton Court Palace is a hotspot. Can the virus be contained in the maze?
https://mobile.twitter.com/ArtySmokesPS/status/1429895546450366470
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasiel_Correia#Recall_and_re-election
Amusingly I see from the wikipedia page on the upcoming vote that every Californian governor since the 1960s has faced recall attempts - whilst most didn't go to a vote that probably shows it is still too easy to do, and that the politial culture is messed up.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
Citation needed.
Perhaps not.
Interestingly London has been seeing falls in cases recently.
Yes on recall 4.0
No on recall 1.3
That seems a to indicate punters think one outcome is much more likely than the other, which seems surprising as the poles are close. The pro-recall seem to have more energy, if less money.
I don't make a lot of bets, but I'm tempted to make a small value bet on yes, but would interested in any other thoughts.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1429890895206363141?s=19
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/08/britains-brexit-slow-puncture.html
*it is not done
https://twitter.com/rafaelbehr/status/1429900505707319305
If we'd continued that rate of investment in new motorways over the past decades we'd be in a much better position. Its ridiculous that we haven't due to an almost religious distaste of roads, cars and HGVs etc as "unclean" etc
New Zealand pandemic policies pushed 18,000 children into poverty, study shows
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/27/new-zealand-pandemic-policies-pushed-18000-children-into-poverty-study-shows
More seriously, is "because it is heavy" such a bad answer?
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/west-fall-of-kabul-sudan-iraq-afghanistan-us-uk-policies
I know companies who are looking at more home working, not less. Should I proclaim this as the death knell for the office?
Hardly.
Should I quake in terror at the sheer power and influence of your prose?
Nah.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
Example: Austria wanted to introduce new rules IIRC requiring products to show the sourece of the energy used to produce it, so consumers could choose products that used green energy, which we might think a harmless addition to consumer information. They were forced to drop the idea, because Austrian companies familiar with the scheme would have found it easier to comply with.
There is nothing to stop us introducing some new rules that British companies would find as difficult as anyone else, perhaps for some quality reason. But I'm not sure that's the idea.
The government administration of their use has been pretty hopeless. But their current availability is very useful if you want to avoid infecting other people at work, or at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_California_gubernatorial_recall_election
tldr: he's made some mistakes and the GOP want to unseat him. They might succeed but probably won't - one poll suggeste dotherwise but it seems to have been an outlier.
PCR is extremely accurate (far more so than LFTs) at telling if you have any virus in your system, but that isn’t the same thing at all.
When people have the flu and go out and about no one has ever previously talked of them being guilty of manslaughter.
Bali, 2002
Madrid, 2004
7/7 (London), 2005
Mumbai, 2008
The crux of the matter is Labour supporters/Boris haters have to find some excuse to be being optimistic, when the polls are worse for them at this stage than any other time in opposition since the 79s ,bar the Corbyn years. I just don’t think there is any real logic to it
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years
But (for example) in a month’s time my mother is due a hip operation. LFTs give me some confidence that it’s safe to carry on visiting her without jeopardising that.
If it's about just choosing our own certification (which it is) so anyone selling into our market needs to meet certain rules and standards then it's absolutely fine.
I'd say my guestimate of "it came from the lab" has probably gone up from 40% to 75% after watching it.
On the other hand there are still a bunch of red wall seats like Bolsover that Labour can win back if they are level pegging with the Tories nationally on a uniform swing. I don't believe differential turnout will be the same in 2023/24 as in 2019 but Starmer will struggle to exceed Kinnock's 35% based on his current performance.
On the subject of the thread I think it is impossible for Labour to get a majority in 2023/2024 and get more than 250-60 seats but there is a sort of plausible route to a Labour majority in 2028/29 if they win back 20+ seats from the SNP, seats they haven't won since 1997/2001 like Shrewsbury, Scarborough and maybe even Shapps' seat etc as well as new targets like Bournemouth, Macclesfield, Colchester etc.
We must remain eternally vigilant
Newsom will probably be recalled and the Dems don't have a solid backup candidate and because California's recall law is uterly idiotic the GOP candidate had a great chance of winning.
This could lead to the Dems losing the Senate because if Feinstein drops dead the Govenor fills the post with their pick.
This is astoundingly shit politics by the stupidest party in America.
I have to do them weekly for work, and wouldn't fake them there.
But it won't happen, as scared of losing Chinese money and that they will totally withdraw from global surveillance programs.