Some of the seats LAB needs to win for a Commons majority – politicalbetting.com

TOPPING said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

kle4 said:

Must comment the ballsiness of the paralympic ad campaign 'It's ok, you can stare'.

Leon said:

Quincel said:

Casino_Royale said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

Is it on catch-up?

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/did-covid-leak-from-a-lab-in-china

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

Northern_Al said:

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.

Pagan2 said:

TOPPING said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

ERP = erotic role play?

DavidL said:

kle4 said:

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.

theProle said:

MaxPB said:

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.

Cookie said:

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.

isam said:

...

Stuartinromford said:

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

rottenborough said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

Theuniondivvie said:

TimT said:

IshmaelZ said:

turbotubbs said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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..

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

Quincel said:

Casino_Royale said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

Is it on catch-up?

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/did-covid-leak-from-a-lab-in-china

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

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

ydoethur said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

rottenborough said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

ydoethur said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

rottenborough said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

rcs1000 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

theProle said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

I see that the utter, unmitigated lunacy of requiring new 'UKCA' certification, and not recognising CE marks, has been postponed for a full year:

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1429844646088282120

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.

Casino_Royale said:

rcs1000 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

theProle said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

I see that the utter, unmitigated lunacy of requiring new 'UKCA' certification, and not recognising CE marks, has been postponed for a full year:

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1429844646088282120

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.

DougSeal said:

Here’s one for you WFH enthusiasts.I’ve been asked to write an article on offshoring WFH jobs.

Casino_Royale said:

rcs1000 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

theProle said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

I see that the utter, unmitigated lunacy of requiring new 'UKCA' certification, and not recognising CE marks, has been postponed for a full year:

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1429844646088282120

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.

ydoethur said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

A somewhat more direct problem in Italy:
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.

DougSeal said:

Casino_Royale said:

rcs1000 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

theProle said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

I see that the utter, unmitigated lunacy of requiring new 'UKCA' certification, and not recognising CE marks, has been postponed for a full year:

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1429844646088282120

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.

Carnyx said:

DougSeal said:

Here’s one for you WFH enthusiasts.I’ve been asked to write an article on offshoring WFH jobs.

Casino_Royale said:

rcs1000 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

theProle said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

I see that the utter, unmitigated lunacy of requiring new 'UKCA' certification, and not recognising CE marks, has been postponed for a full year:

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1429844646088282120

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.

And Nippon.

Foxy said:

Andy_JS said:

It's confusing for outsiders because the tube station is "High Street Kensington" and the official name of the road is "Kensington High Street".

In all the long history of PB, has there been a more pointless argument than this?

NickPalmer said:

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

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).

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

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?

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

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.

NickPalmer said:

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

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).

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

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?

ydoethur said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

Pulpstar said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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 ? 🤔

theProle said:

ydoethur said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

JosiasJessop said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

Philip_Thompson said:

MattW said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

tlg86 said:

MaxPB said:

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.

A somewhat more direct problem in Italy:
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.

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!

DougSeal said:

Here’s one for you WFH enthusiasts. I’ve been asked to write an article on offshoring WFH jobs.

Casino_Royale said:

NickPalmer said:

Casino_Royale said:

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" ?

Citation needed.

Stuartinromford said:

isam said:

...

Stuartinromford said:

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.

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

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).

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

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.

Richard_Tyndall said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

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.

TOPPING said:

squareroot2 said:

Foxy said:

Andy_JS said:

It's confusing for outsiders because the tube station is "High Street Kensington" and the official name of the road is "Kensington High Street".

In all the long history of PB, has there been a more pointless argument than this?

Silly season rules OK!

As someone who spent the first 27 yrs of my life as a Londoner. Its Kensington High Street and the tube is High Street Ken.

Only 27 years. Where was that spent? At Ken Market at Gaz's! I DIDN'T THINK SO.

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

rottenborough said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

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.

NickPalmer said:

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

contrarian said:

NickPalmer said:

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).

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

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:

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.

Foxy said:

Andy_JS said:

It's confusing for outsiders because the tube station is "High Street Kensington" and the official name of the road is "Kensington High Street".

In all the long history of PB, has there been a more pointless argument than this?

Silly season rules OK!

NickPalmer said:

isam said:

Locking everyone in their house and closing the pubs isn't "unpopular-but-necessary?"

No, it had overwhleming public support. Odd, perhaps, but true.

TOPPING said:

NickPalmer said:

TOPPING said:

.

NickPalmer said:

TOPPING said:

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.

Nigelb said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

Carnyx said:

ydoethur said:

rottenborough said:

turbotubbs said:

Foxy said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

TOPPING said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Boardmasters: 4,700 Covid cases 'may be linked' to Newquay festival
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-58309660

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.

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.

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.

HYUFD said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

HYUFD said:

DougSeal said:

HYUFD said:

IanB2 said:

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/west-fall-of-kabul-sudan-iraq-afghanistan-us-uk-policies

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

The 2001 invasion didn't prevent:

Bali, 2002
Madrid, 2004
7/7 (London), 2005
Mumbai, 2008

None of which had even a quarter of the deathrate of 9/11.

We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years

Alistair said:

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.