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Can Starmer get a conference boost? – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited September 2021 in General
imageCan Starmer get a conference boost? – politicalbetting.com

One of the innovative betting markets that Smarkets has up is in the chart above. What will LAB’s polling average be at the end of the month? These are the market rules:

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    edited September 2021
    Yes, he can.

    edit: and (I think!) third first in a row! I'm spending a little too much time on PB, methinks ...
  • He has a bigger open goal than that famous Ronny Rosenthal miss....
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited September 2021

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited September 2021
    Interesting market.

    My hunch is, the value, if there is any, is probably laying 34-36% @2.1 if there’s any liquidity available.

    Btw, sorry to be a pedant but there’s a typo;

    “Although 34-46%, the current favourite“
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
  • paulyork64paulyork64 Posts: 2,461
    ping said:

    Interesting market.

    The value IMO is probably laying 34-36% @2.1 if there’s any liquidity available.

    Btw, sorry to be a pedant but there’s a typo;

    “Although 34-46%, the current favourite“

    agreed. this far out i'd be happy to lay the favourite with the bands quite narrow.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,206
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112
    edited September 2021
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,708
    I doubt it, he is the most boring Labour leader of my lifetime, even Ed Miliband had more charisma and was a better public speaker.

    In some respects Starmer is Labour's IDS, less disliked than the previous party leader but with no charisma and few fans either
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Another NIMBY blocking progress.
  • Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    Yes, Piers and Uncle Rupe will have GBTV for breakfast. It won't even be a contest.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,688
    The bet is about Labour getting a boost rather than Starmer getting one. I can quite easily see his personal approval improving, simply because he'll get some exposure. Whether the party will or not is harder to judge as who knows what the left might say or do.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    Ah, Carnforth has explained on the previous thread - through trains posed problems for customs control and Schengen etc.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,206
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,840
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    As a resident I can confirm. But sometimes local objections must be overriden otherwise the risk is we get bogged down and take far too long with things, or don't do them at all.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,956
    edited September 2021
    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874
    I'd expect a boost for Labour after the conference, from the simple fact of being in the news for a few days. Oddly, despite the sound and fury about the new NI tax, it seems to have vanished from the headlines pretty fast. It may be doing damage out there, but its not catastrophic.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    Was on holiday in Munich a couple of years back - the train station really felt like the heart of Europe.
  • A map of the proposed HS2-HS1 link:

    https://assets.dft.gov.uk/publications/hs2-maps-20120110/hs2arp00drrw05140issue2.pdf

    Wasn't is supposed to be mainly in tunnel? Which would make it horrendously expensive for marginal return....
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    I am sure we will have a few of the usual suspects arguing why he shouldn't be deported when he is released:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-58585788
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    Pulpstar said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    Was on holiday in Munich a couple of years back - the train station really felt like the heart of Europe.
    Yes, Pan-European train services would be epic. Travelled from Barcelona to Seville years back and it was a fantastic way to go.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    edited September 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
    That was the trouble with motorrail in the end. It cost a fortune, and could never compete with EasyJet plus Europcar for either time, cost or convenience.

    Except for the convenience of having your own car in Southern Europe without either the strain of driving 15 hours through the night or the luxury, in terms of time, of wending your way down over three or four days, as I am now able to do. And motorrail was a great way to start a holiday, forcing you to relax on the train; having dinner in the dining car as the train sped south through France was always a pleasure, even if despite the actual food.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,727
    Watching this on the live feed from the Capitol just behind me in studio. CNN is checking. https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1438513570518495257/video/1
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,206
    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    As a resident I can confirm. But sometimes local objections must be overriden otherwise the risk is we get bogged down and take far too long with things, or don't do them at all.
    I agree! Just, you know, NIMBY?

    And now, work
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
    Spent all the money on high profile presenters. Very little on making sure the technicians were up to scratch.
    Straight away gave off an amateurish air. Which meant the non-committed lost interest quickly.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    Pulpstar said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    Was on holiday in Munich a couple of years back - the train station really felt like the heart of Europe.
    If you take the night ferry from Harwich to Holland, and then continue south by train, Munich is the inevitable second night stopover. Hence the station is surrounded by hotels of all price ranges. As you say, from Munich you can go everywhere.
  • The fundamental problem for a direct service from North of London to the continent is the small size of the travel market. A full length High speed train can carry 1400 passengers. if 100% of the passengers from Birmingham or Manchester to Paris tranferred to train then you are looking at just 2 trains a day. They could make a profit on 3 maybe 4 trains a day from Manchester and Birmingham to Paris. (The figures from Leeds are worse). This compares to dozens of flight on 200 passenger planes. Frequency wins with Planes. Outside of Paris there is not a big enough market for a direct train. It would only make sense if there were through trains from the North, stopping in London and then on to the continent. Security requirements mean the number of stops that can be served are limited. No intra European traffic keeping the train full, until it got closer to the UK for example.

    With a limited market and the strong domestic demand for a high speed path into London, it just makes sense for everyone to catch a train to Euston and walk to St Pancreas for international services. There are longer walks in Heathrow.
  • Taken together, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the pivot against China, and the prioritization of the old Anglo alliances over the EU are all grand strategic moves. “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.”

    The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    Ah, Carnforth has explained on the previous thread - through trains posed problems for customs control and Schengen etc.
    Hang on: in the old days, you'd simply have customs and immigration staff board the train and check everyone on board. So long as they have a register of everyone on board and their seat number, they can check everyone off.

    Now, will it stop someone managing to smuggle in cannabis from the Netherlands? No. Can it be used to make sure everyone has passports? Yes.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112
    edited September 2021

    A map of the proposed HS2-HS1 link:

    https://assets.dft.gov.uk/publications/hs2-maps-20120110/hs2arp00drrw05140issue2.pdf

    Wasn't is supposed to be mainly in tunnel? Which would make it horrendously expensive for marginal return....

    Now I am even more confused. The link is actually a small part of that map - and on the line of the existing railway, with some engineering at the St P end. Roughly the red line on the right hadn third of the map. The rest of the red line seems to be on thje actual main line out of Euston. From the map, the link to the spur comes out of the main tunnel very close to the existing junction, all on railway land. So I can't see how this spur was supposed to cause such devastation.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    Omnium said:

    The bet is about Labour getting a boost rather than Starmer getting one. I can quite easily see his personal approval improving, simply because he'll get some exposure. Whether the party will or not is harder to judge as who knows what the left might say or do.

    On topic. It’s not a very illuminating market coming before the end of the conference season - previous years PB has said wait till the polls after all conferences to assess where the party’s are and any changes.

    You can get wild polling day of Leader speeches or day after, end of conference. But it’s ephemeral.

    Labour are struggling to poll nearer 40 or above because they have a problem with Lexits still in love with Boris, an existential problem to Starmer hopes of ever being PM if it this crisis of Lexits doesn’t go away.

    The only thing of note from this Labour conference is what Starmer has to say to the Lexits he needs back. And does it work.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080

    The fundamental problem for a direct service from North of London to the continent is the small size of the travel market. A full length High speed train can carry 1400 passengers. if 100% of the passengers from Birmingham or Manchester to Paris tranferred to train then you are looking at just 2 trains a day. They could make a profit on 3 maybe 4 trains a day from Manchester and Birmingham to Paris. (The figures from Leeds are worse). This compares to dozens of flight on 200 passenger planes. Frequency wins with Planes. Outside of Paris there is not a big enough market for a direct train. It would only make sense if there were through trains from the North, stopping in London and then on to the continent. Security requirements mean the number of stops that can be served are limited. No intra European traffic keeping the train full, until it got closer to the UK for example.

    With a limited market and the strong domestic demand for a high speed path into London, it just makes sense for everyone to catch a train to Euston and walk to St Pancreas for international services. There are longer walks in Heathrow.

    It does partly depend on how the costs are assessed - the biggest costs for railways being financing, construction and maintenance, with the actual marginal running costs being low.

    That was one of the changes that also helped kill off sleeper and motorail services, which in the ‘old days’ used to run gratis over the networks of countries other than the operator, on the basis that during the night there were few other trains about and hence marginal cost for the non-operating network was minimal. When average cost charging between countries came in (during the early 2000s I think), such that Belgian railways had to pay French or German and Austrian or Swiss and Italian railways to travel on their lines, many of the services were wound up as unviable within the next few years.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,955
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
    That was the trouble with motorrail in the end. It cost a fortune, and could never compete with EasyJet plus Europcar for either time, cost or convenience.

    Except for the convenience of having your own car in Southern Europe without either the strain of driving 15 hours through the night or the luxury, in terms of time, of wending your way down over three or four days, as I am now able to do. And motorrail was a great way to start a holiday, forcing you to relax on the train; having dinner in the dining car as the train sped south through France was always a pleasure, even if despite the actual food.
    You still had a car designed for driving on the other side of the road though....
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Camden Town is such a dump, how much damage can knocking some of it down have done anyway? ;)
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
    It has been shambolically launched - which is a surprise because I think both you and I know Paul Marshall, and he's usually a pretty shrewd operator.

    But I'm not convinced there's that big a market for any network TV news channel in the UK. Simply, outside of waiting rooms in London offices (which are also going the way of the dodo), what is the combined viewership of TV news channels in the UK?

    I mean, I guess Fox could effectively use the same reportage with a different set of commentators and make the numbers work, but video delivery is all VOD/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok these days, and viewership of even new channels in the US is cratering.

    A curated set of commentators on on-line platforms with cross promotion could work. But I think the days of big centrally planned TV news channels are coming to an end.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited September 2021
    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
    It wasn't just the shambles of the tech side, weird mishmash of hires of fringe antivax / antilockdown loonie types, mainly of Talk Radio, plus piss poor presenters who have had a go on other channels mixed with old long in the tooth lesser known faces off BBC / Sky.

    If they had managed to hire the likes of say Ferrari, Morgan, fresh face like a Freddie Sayers, who is super smart and different to usual news channel types without being a nutter, plus Farage and Neill, not necessarily my cup of tea, but it would have got ratings.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
    That was the trouble with motorrail in the end. It cost a fortune, and could never compete with EasyJet plus Europcar for either time, cost or convenience.

    Except for the convenience of having your own car in Southern Europe without either the strain of driving 15 hours through the night or the luxury, in terms of time, of wending your way down over three or four days, as I am now able to do. And motorrail was a great way to start a holiday, forcing you to relax on the train; having dinner in the dining car as the train sped south through France was always a pleasure, even if despite the actual food.
    We used to do it regularly. It was great.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    This would be after ‘levelling up’, I presume, when millions from Lancashire and the toon are holidaying in Tuscany?
  • Pulpstar said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    Was on holiday in Munich a couple of years back - the train station really felt like the heart of Europe.
    A station full of blood is not an appealing prospect.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited September 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
    It has been shambolically launched - which is a surprise because I think both you and I know Paul Marshall, and he's usually a pretty shrewd operator.

    But I'm not convinced there's that big a market for any network TV news channel in the UK. Simply, outside of waiting rooms in London offices (which are also going the way of the dodo), what is the combined viewership of TV news channels in the UK?

    I mean, I guess Fox could effectively use the same reportage with a different set of commentators and make the numbers work, but video delivery is all VOD/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok these days, and viewership of even new channels in the US is cratering.

    A curated set of commentators on on-line platforms with cross promotion could work. But I think the days of big centrally planned TV news channels are coming to an end.
    My understanding with Fox News in the US, is not only a much bigger natural audience for news entertainment, but they use it as much to leverage other parts of the Murdoch empire e.g the sports on Fox, now betting (which Rupert has bought a big stakes in).

    In comparison, Sky News has never has had much of an audience, I am not sure what the backers of GB News thought they could achieve that a multi-channel mass broadcaster with all the leverage couldn't.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    edited September 2021

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
    That was the trouble with motorrail in the end. It cost a fortune, and could never compete with EasyJet plus Europcar for either time, cost or convenience.

    Except for the convenience of having your own car in Southern Europe without either the strain of driving 15 hours through the night or the luxury, in terms of time, of wending your way down over three or four days, as I am now able to do. And motorrail was a great way to start a holiday, forcing you to relax on the train; having dinner in the dining car as the train sped south through France was always a pleasure, even if despite the actual food.
    You still had a car designed for driving on the other side of the road though....
    I don’t find that a problem at all. Indeed having a car I know is an advantage. For overtaking, sometimes it’s a disadvantage but it can also be an advantage on a right hand bend when you can look inside the traffic ahead.

    And on Alpine roads, you can see where the edge is much easier when you are sitting right by it!
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
  • 26,911 and 158 deaths
  • Flattered by absence of Scotland, but even so down over 11,000 vs last week, so still a hefty reduction:

    United Kingdom Daily Coronavirus (COVID-19) Report · Thursday 16th September.

    26,911 new cases (people positive) reported, giving a total of 7,339,009.

    158 new deaths reported, giving a total of 134,805.
    https://twitter.com/UKCovid19Stats/status/1438518800706457600?s=20
  • 26,911 and 158 deaths

    No Scotland data....England cases well down again.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362

    Taken together, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the pivot against China, and the prioritization of the old Anglo alliances over the EU are all grand strategic moves. “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.”

    The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/

    “ “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.” 😆

    It’s quickly turning into gibberish. It should wake people up though to what’s really been going on, how our sleep at the wheel leaders have dropped us in it. It’s only like, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, our government is still selling us off to China!
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    When you say huge market to the Alps, you mean there are about 30 trains a year, some of which (the day trains) are only half full.
    Well we are talking about sleeper trains, ergo NOT day trains.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited September 2021
    https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/pot4jj/the_perfect_storm_understanding_uk_energy_prices/

    Interesting Reddit post/discussion on energy from ppl who claim to be in the know.

    Could we potentially see blackouts?
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    edited September 2021
    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
    +1

    (Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)

    The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    It would be doing the world (and Camden) a favour to demolish some parts of it.

    (Speaking as a former resident of Camden).

    If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 20,695

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I notice Rebekah's back (after keeping a low profile for years) ;)
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
    In those days - and really up until the end of Kinnock post-1987 - you got to keep fighting General Elections until you won. What proportion of Conservative and Labour leaders between 1945 and 1990 did not end up Prime Minister?

    It has to be well under 20%.

  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    ping said:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/pot4jj/the_perfect_storm_understanding_uk_energy_prices/

    Interesting Reddit post/discussion on energy from ppl who claim to be in the know.

    Could we potentially see blackouts?

    Will someone have to take off, and eat a shirt or something? Off the top of my head, Boris has inherited through May from Cameron a promise to take his shirt off if the lights go out?
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    Except a) it doesn't take 2-3 hours. It takes more than twice that once you have faffed around with the ludicrous arsing about that flying requires.

    And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    It would be doing the world (and Camden) a favour to demolish some parts of it.

    (Speaking as a former resident of Camden).

    If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
    Keep Hampstead, Highgate and Bloomsbury, and flatten everything in between.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    edited September 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
    In those days - and really up until the end of Kinnock post-1987 - you got to keep fighting General Elections until you won. What proportion of Conservative and Labour leaders between 1945 and 1990 did not end up Prime Minister?

    It has to be well under 20%.

    It's three out of thirteen who didn't end up PM. But one of them died in office (Gaitskill), so you should probably exclude him.

    The other two were Foot and Kinnock in the 80s.

    And, of course, Kinnock could still technically become Prime Minister...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    IanB2 said:

    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    It would be doing the world (and Camden) a favour to demolish some parts of it.

    (Speaking as a former resident of Camden).

    If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
    Keep Hampstead, Highgate and Bloomsbury, and flatten everything in between.
    Hang on: what about Belsize Park and Primrose Hill?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021

    Taken together, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the pivot against China, and the prioritization of the old Anglo alliances over the EU are all grand strategic moves. “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.”

    The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/

    Read a para. It seems a bit starting-from-here and constructing a 20-20 narrative. Is this true:

    The basics are these: In 2016, Australia struck a deal with France to buy a fleet of diesel-powered submarines, rejecting an Anglo-American alternative for nuclear-powered vessels.

    Were they offered such an alternative, or is this embroidery with fairy-stories?
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    It would be doing the world (and Camden) a favour to demolish some parts of it.

    (Speaking as a former resident of Camden).

    If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
    Keep Hampstead, Highgate and Bloomsbury, and flatten everything in between.
    Hang on: what about Belsize Park and Primrose Hill?
    They’re the transition zones, I guess we could keep the odd road or two.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    It would be doing the world (and Camden) a favour to demolish some parts of it.

    (Speaking as a former resident of Camden).

    If Camden had never existed, Ken Livingstone might never have got his big break in the late 70s.
    Keep Hampstead, Highgate and Bloomsbury, and flatten everything in between.
    Hang on: what about Belsize Park and Primrose Hill?
    They’re the transition zones, I guess we could keep the odd road or two.
    Details, details. Consider the big picture, not the view from SeanT''s balcony.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    Except a) it doesn't take 2-3 hours. It takes more than twice that once you have faffed around with the ludicrous arsing about that flying requires.

    And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
    Yep: if we had overnight sleeper/ motorail, leaving mid evening from a few strategic locations, you could leave work a little early and be in your holiday destination late morning the next day, even allowing for a bit of driving at both ends. Whereas flying you’d either lose a day, or arrive in your destination at midnight, or more likely have to get up at 4am for some dawn flight and still not actually be on holiday until the afternoon.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    IanB2 said:

    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
    +1

    (Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)

    The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
    Yes. Schaarbeek. We would stay in Bruges though - a lovely town.

    5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....

  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
    +1

    (Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)

    The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
    Yes. Schaarbeek. We would stay in Bruges though - a lovely town.

    5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....

    It's not that long since the Royal Free in Hampstead had a line painted on the ground, inside which you were not allowed to use a mobile phone. :smile:

    Thinking of you.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    Except a) it doesn't take 2-3 hours. It takes more than twice that once you have faffed around with the ludicrous arsing about that flying requires.

    And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
    The thing is all these train routes aren't any different - they are great if you live in a town where the train stops so you can board otherwise you end up with similar faffs trying to get into central XYZ to catch the train.

    Also the second point is demand simply isn't there. The total demand across the North for flights to Tuscany is probably equal to one train max a week.
  • rpjsrpjs Posts: 3,787
    Catching up but on the Euro night trains issue, with due deference to others more knowledgeable than me, but I’d like to add a few observations:

    1) The original plan for the channel tunnel passenger services was to run night trains from at least between Manchester and Paris, but that was scrapped fairly soon before the main ex-London services began as the low-cost airline revolution had begun and it was clear the planes would outcompete the trains. They had even bought rolling stock for the night services which ended up being sold to the Canadians.

    A few years back, many internal European sleeper services were dying off until governments started to get more aggressive about reducing internal air travel for environmental reasons, and now the night trains are coming back, hence this plan.

    2) There is a bypass around Paris, before the pandemic Eurostar ran weekly direct trains to Avignon in the summer. There was a connector planned between HS1 and HS2 to bypass changing trains in London but that got dropped on cost grounds quite early on.

    3j Originally immigration formalities took place on the train, with cursory customs checks at the destination. This was later replaced by the current “juxtaposed” checks before boarding. This resulted in the so-called “Lille shuffle” where UK-bound pax from Avignon had to detrain at Lille and go through British border control before reboarding.

    To make cross-channel sleeper services attractive, as well as for north-of-London services using a bypass connector, it’d be much better to restore on-train checks for those trains, which was routine pre-Schengen and across more closed borders. Even the Finns and the Russians do on-train checks on their service between Helsinki and St Petersburg.

    4) Perhaps the biggest challenge is technical. British railways have a smaller “loading gauge” (the space the actual vehicle bodies can safely travel in, not the width between the wheels), than the standard European one, so standard European trains won’t fit on most British lines. As the current HS1 line from St Pancras to the tunnel wasn’t completed until well after the tunnel opened, the original Eurostar trains were built to British loading gauge. The new fleet replacing them is built to the standard European high-speed line specifications, as was HS1 and will be HS2, but it’s still going to require a connection somewhere between HS1 and HS2 to make London-bypassing night or day trains possible. They could go back to the original plan of using British-spec rolling stock for north-of-London services, but I suspect that will be difficult to work financially.

    Even with a connector, HS2 is only as of now definitely (if at all) going to Birmingham and I think Crewe / Manchester is most likely to happen next, but I doubt all the services further out on that German map will happen any time soon.

    I’ll get me coat.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited September 2021
    MattW said:

    Taken together, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the pivot against China, and the prioritization of the old Anglo alliances over the EU are all grand strategic moves. “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.”

    The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/

    Read a para. It seems a bit starting-from-here and constructing a 20-20 narrative. Is this true:

    The basics are these: In 2016, Australia struck a deal with France to buy a fleet of diesel-powered submarines, rejecting an Anglo-American alternative for nuclear-powered vessels.

    Were they offered such an alternative, or is this embroidery with fairy-stories?
    I suspect in 2016 the nuclear powered option simply wasn't available.

    Edit - the 2016 bidders where France, Germany and Japan. Nuclear clearly wasn't an option as Australia went for the Diesel version of France's Diesel / Nuclear submarine design

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/apr/26/france-to-build-australias-new-submarine-fleet-as-50bn-contract-awarded has the story.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited September 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
    In those days - and really up until the end of Kinnock post-1987 - you got to keep fighting General Elections until you won. What proportion of Conservative and Labour leaders between 1945 and 1990 did not end up Prime Minister?

    It has to be well under 20%.

    Good point. Can only think of Gaitskell. For unfortunate reasons. And Foot for more obvious ones. Not a single Tory. Wonder what changed? I would argue, Kinnock too was a special case, losing an election pretty comfortably he was widely expected to win.
    Tories under Blair really started the ditching the leader after one defeat. Or none in IDS' case.

    Edit. Oops. You've covered that.
    So, who was the Tory leader before Hague never to be PM?
    19th Century I reckon.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    IanB2 said:

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    Except a) it doesn't take 2-3 hours. It takes more than twice that once you have faffed around with the ludicrous arsing about that flying requires.

    And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
    Yep: if we had overnight sleeper/ motorail, leaving mid evening from a few strategic locations, you could leave work a little early and be in your holiday destination late morning the next day, even allowing for a bit of driving at both ends. Whereas flying you’d either lose a day, or arrive in your destination at midnight, or more likely have to get up at 4am for some dawn flight and still not actually be on holiday until the afternoon.
    Indeed. I have been faced with this very dilemma recently. I opted for the dawn(ish) flight but as you say, I won’t even reach the shower in my hotel room until lunchtime.
  • Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    If you want the detail, here's the report into the options.
    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/480372/HS2-HS1_report.pdf

    "The principle of a rail connection linking HS1 and HS2 remains strategically attractive, and HS2 Ltd remains committed to it if it could physically be achieved at a reasonable and proportionate cost. HS2 Ltd will keep an open mind to this possibility. However, the combination of tight physical constraints and the demands on existing services in this critical part of our national infrastructure make it very difficult to achieve. Longer-term opportunities for a rail connection could be safeguarded by making some provision during the construction of HS2, but lower-cost passive provision options would lead to unacceptable disruption to HS2 during construction of the link. To guard against this, the provision would have to be active rather than passive, and this would come at considerable cost. There are a number of other reasons why future investment in the rail link would be highly unlikely – notably because of the other difficulties with later construction, and the limited capacity that would be available for international services on HS2. Accordingly, neither active nor passive provision for a rail link is recommended."

    Basically: whilst a rail link is an attractive idea, the Camden link was a compromise. It required expensive works, and had to fit in around the North London Line services, so there would not be many paths for services.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341
    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Rupert Murdoch has signed up Piers Morgan and will launch a new TV network to challenge the BBC and GB News, in a move likely to further inflame Britain's culture wars

    https://twitter.com/telebusiness/status/1438499201952862214

    Called it. Well I won't be watching that then...

    GB News will be down to a viewership of only those exiled from PB for causing England batting collapses.
    I guess Fox has the advantage that they can reuse all their existing facilities, and probably some of their US programming.

    But it does rather feel like two bald men fighting over a comb.

    There is an argument for saying GB News' problem is not its target market - which is probably quite large - just the shambolic way it has been done.

    In that way, it makes sense for Murdoch to come in plus he can cross-advertise / promote with his newspapers.
    It has been shambolically launched - which is a surprise because I think both you and I know Paul Marshall, and he's usually a pretty shrewd operator.

    But I'm not convinced there's that big a market for any network TV news channel in the UK. Simply, outside of waiting rooms in London offices (which are also going the way of the dodo), what is the combined viewership of TV news channels in the UK?

    I mean, I guess Fox could effectively use the same reportage with a different set of commentators and make the numbers work, but video delivery is all VOD/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok these days, and viewership of even new channels in the US is cratering.

    A curated set of commentators on on-line platforms with cross promotion could work. But I think the days of big centrally planned TV news channels are coming to an end.
    On a related question, is it known whether anyone in significant numbers listens to Times Radio?

  • isamisam Posts: 40,721
    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    I thought that looked a bit big
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
    +1

    (Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)

    The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
    Yes. Schaarbeek. We would stay in Bruges though - a lovely town.

    5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....

    Oh dear.

    I had the option of staying in Bruges on the return from my current trip. But I think there’s a chance of getting the dog a Belgian passport so have rerouted to Ypres instead. Which apparently in Flemish is Leper.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    dixiedean said:

    rcs1000 said:

    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
    In those days - and really up until the end of Kinnock post-1987 - you got to keep fighting General Elections until you won. What proportion of Conservative and Labour leaders between 1945 and 1990 did not end up Prime Minister?

    It has to be well under 20%.

    Good point. Can only think of Gaitskell. For unfortunate reasons. And Foot for more obvious ones. Not a single Tory. Wonder what changed? I would argue, Kinnock too was a special case, losing an election pretty comfortably he was widely expected to win.
    Tories under Blair really started the ditching the leader after one defeat. Or none in IDS' case.

    Edit. Oops. You've covered that.
    So, who was the Tory leader before Hague never to be PM?
    19th Century I reckon.
    Austen Chamberlain.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    edited September 2021

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    A lot of people at that time (prior to Dave's conference speech) had a similar view of Cameron as many now have of Starmer. This is why, though I am not a Labour supporter, I would not write Starmer off
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112
    IanB2 said:

    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Cyclefree said:

    IanB2 said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    You can certainly go from Calais to all points south without having to go via Paris - back in the day when the night trains had motorail attached, we used it to go all sort of places. And used Belgian, Dutch and German motorrail as well, all now sadly defunct, or almost so.

    Sean will note that from the old Naples service (which AIR was DB from Düsseldorf) you never got a glimpse of Capri from the train, it being the other side of the town, and you woke up on the North Italian plains and then sat in the train until mid afternoon while it trundled its way down the peninsula.

    The old sleeper services had the lowest priority on the network, would often be shunted unto sidings or left hanging about during the night while other trains went through, and the northern Italian ones deliberately went slow, otherwise you would arrive in the small hours.

    Combining sleepers with high speed would indeed be an innovation, but when you think how far you could get on an HS train in six or seven hours, you only need it for the very longest (and hence least common) journeys like London to Seville and the like.
    There would be a huge market for London to Vienna / Austrian Alps in the winter, just as there is a huge market for the French Alps Eurostar and the Caledonian Sleeper.

    Pan-European services are a GREAT idea. The key is to make them luxurious and FUN.
    We used to have such services and they were fun. The Wagon-Lits from Calais (later Paris) to Rome were a staple of my childhood. There was even the boat train from Victoria. It's how we travelled to Italy.

    Then when the children were younger we regularly put the car on the train at Bruges and travel with the car overnight to Italy, with a lovely evening meal in the restaurant car. You could get off at Livorno and you were in Tuscany. Or go on to Rome. You could also do it via Germany.

    The other option was to put the car on a train in Paris and go to Nice while taking a separate overnight couchette. But the last time I did that the service was abysmal.

    If they reintroduce trains like this it would be great. Much more fun than having to drive through large parts of Europe. But I'll believe it when I see it. It will take significant investment and much better levels of service.
    +1

    (Although it was from Schaarbeek station near Brussels, not Bruges)

    The alarming thing - for first time travellers on Belgian motorail anyhow - was that they often used to take the cars down on a separate train and sort and connect them up during the night. So you’d trundle out of Schaarbeek in the passenger carriage and see out of the window your own car sitting on another train in the siding.
    Yes. Schaarbeek. We would stay in Bruges though - a lovely town.

    5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....

    Oh dear.

    I had the option of staying in Bruges on the return from my current trip. But I think there’s a chance of getting the dog a Belgian passport so have rerouted to Ypres instead. Which apparently in Flemish is Leper.
    Ieper, ie beginning with India not Lima (or Ink not London as our WW1 forebears would have put it).
  • eek said:

    MattW said:

    Taken together, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the pivot against China, and the prioritization of the old Anglo alliances over the EU are all grand strategic moves. “When you make grand strategic moves,” the British official said, “you piss people off.”

    The new military alliance to contain Beijing’s rise looks, then, at first glance, like a reassertion of the old order, but it is really one of the first murmurings of a new one taking its place.


    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/us-uk-australia-china/620094/

    Read a para. It seems a bit starting-from-here and constructing a 20-20 narrative. Is this true:

    The basics are these: In 2016, AuI ahstralia struck a deal with France to buy a fleet of diesel-powered submarines, rejecting an Anglo-American alternative for nuclear-powered vessels.

    Were they offered such an alternative, or is this embroidery with fairy-stories?
    I suspect in 2016 the nuclear powered option simply wasn't available.

    Edit - the 2016 bidders where France, Germany and Japan. Nuclear clearly wasn't an option as Australia went for the Diesel version of France's Diesel / Nuclear submarine design

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/apr/26/france-to-build-australias-new-submarine-fleet-as-50bn-contract-awarded has the story.
    I haven't watched this latest one on this issue yet, but Sub Brief tends to be rather good at this sort of thing (at least to a layman like me).

    "The History of Australia's Attack-class Submarine 2009-2020: France, via Naval Group, fleeced $90 Billion dollars from Australia for the promise of Regional Submarine Superiority. The greatest robbery in the modern era."

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Y4QQ8Hm3k

    It's interesting how the person who wrote the contract for the subs (when it was believed to be going to Japan) went to work in France... and then France won!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,112

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    If you want the detail, here's the report into the options.
    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/480372/HS2-HS1_report.pdf

    "The principle of a rail connection linking HS1 and HS2 remains strategically attractive, and HS2 Ltd remains committed to it if it could physically be achieved at a reasonable and proportionate cost. HS2 Ltd will keep an open mind to this possibility. However, the combination of tight physical constraints and the demands on existing services in this critical part of our national infrastructure make it very difficult to achieve. Longer-term opportunities for a rail connection could be safeguarded by making some provision during the construction of HS2, but lower-cost passive provision options would lead to unacceptable disruption to HS2 during construction of the link. To guard against this, the provision would have to be active rather than passive, and this would come at considerable cost. There are a number of other reasons why future investment in the rail link would be highly unlikely – notably because of the other difficulties with later construction, and the limited capacity that would be available for international services on HS2. Accordingly, neither active nor passive provision for a rail link is recommended."

    Basically: whilst a rail link is an attractive idea, the Camden link was a compromise. It required expensive works, and had to fit in around the North London Line services, so there would not be many paths for services.
    Oh good, thank you!
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    eek said:

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    HYUFD said:

    Linke flirting with relevance.

    Deutschland Wählt
    @Wahlen_DE
    · 4h
    BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

    SPD: 25% (-1)
    Union: 20% (-1)
    GRÜNE: 15%
    AfD: 11% (-1)
    FDP: 10%
    LINKE: 8% (+2)
    FW: 3% (NEU)
    Sonstige: 7% (-3)

    SPD and Grune and Linke still only gets to 48% though, SPD and Grune and FDP does get to 50%
    I think this is an outlier for die Linke but I would be surprised if they poll less than 6% and get less than 3 constituency seats in East Berlin. I would be surprised if they got any constituency elsewhere though (like Leipzig/Dresden etc)
    Assuming that FW and Sonstige(others) are not in the final shareout as they are below 5%, then 48 out of 90 will definitely be above 50%, therefore a majority.
    I agree about the Linke 8% being an outlier (the other poll on the same day showed them still at 6). But as Gary and Davey say, the sPD is likely to have a choice - Greens plus FDP or Linke. I think Scholz would prefer the FDP, though that might lose some voters on the left. Probably we won't know at once as Scholz will trade off one against the other in negotiations.
    On a lighter note, this is what the Greens in Germany want for a sleeper train network. It gets my vote!


    Mine too. Some impossibly romantic journeys there. London to Venice. London to Barcelona. London to Naples. Wake up looking at Capri!

    Edinburgh to Athens would be the ultimate but they've gotta get up and cross stations in London. Sorry about that
    Yes, that's one reason why we need to build a direct link to HS2, so trains from Scotland/northern England can go direct to the continent. That said, I believe Paris suffers from the same issue (I could be wrong, I dare say the PB Train Experts will clarify).
    From booking trains from Edinburgh to Avignon for my late dad, he had to change stations in both London and Paris. Might be different now, but I suspect the two countries both suffer from their capital=galactic centre symdrome and can't imagine that anyone might not automatically want to pay homage.
    Certainly an issue in nations with Primate Cities. I mean, Londoners and Parisians do have a point. They are both fantastic cities. But we really do need to consider rail bypasses for both.
    I'm not sure it is actually necessary to destroy Camden as Leon fears - my friend who lives there showed me once a spur running off the main line (into Euston) at the Regents Park Road bridge that headed off east and entered a tangle of tracks and viaducts in the former gas-metery wastelands north of the British Library, so there's something right there, though needing engineering at the St Pancras end. Maybe someone knows why this wasn't picked up on.
    One would certainly hope there are options. There is indeed a spaghetti nest of railway lines up there. You'd think something would be possible?
    Leon's 'destroy Camden' comments are just repetition of the Camden NIMBYs who were against the scheme - led in the media by a certain Stanley Johnson (I'm sure I've heard of him before?)

    Besides, as SeanT Leon knows all too well, Camden has been cut through many times; the Regent's Canal, the railway in the 1850s, roads and developments - and it still manages to thrive.

    In reality, the scheme was canned because it was massively expensive for very little benefit. It as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. So it was the first thing axed on the scheme.
    FPT but if I may please - what was the main problem? I mean, there's already a railway almost all the way!
    Josias is being glib. The plans for Camden were horrendous. A decade of enormous demolition and building, all around the central Market area, and further south and east.

    Put it this way, you wouldn't want it in YOUR neighborhood
    Surely not for [edit] renovating a branch line and some extra points and signals. There's somethijng missing from the equation.
    No, the changes/demolitions needed were huge, and for very little benefit (as Josias has accepted)

    I examined them closely at the time! It was called the Camden Spur I think? Something like that

    If you look at old HS2 documents online you'll probably find them still
    That's simply not true, @Leon.

    There were enormous benefits for the people who really matter - i.e, people from the Red Wall keen to spend time i Tuscany, and not moany Remainers in Camden.
    Let's see 2-3 hours by plane from Newcastle / Manchester to Pisa or x hours on a train.

    I know what I would pick most of the time, which is why those routes don't make any sense in real life.
    Except a) it doesn't take 2-3 hours. It takes more than twice that once you have faffed around with the ludicrous arsing about that flying requires.

    And b) you have completely failed to address the central point: that SLEEPER trains save you a day. Because you are travelling at NIGHT – i.e. not wasting an entire day of your holiday scrutinising Toblerone bars in some godforsaken, overlit, overheated northern airport.
    The thing is all these train routes aren't any different - they are great if you live in a town where the train stops so you can board otherwise you end up with similar faffs trying to get into central XYZ to catch the train.

    Also the second point is demand simply isn't there. The total demand across the North for flights to Tuscany is probably equal to one train max a week.
    But once they’ve been levelled up with Surrey and Oxfordshire they’ll all be holidaying there?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,593
    UK cases by specimen date

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    UK cases by specimen date scaled to 100K

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    UK Local R

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    UK Case Summary

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    UK hospitals

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  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    edited September 2021
    Cyclefree said:



    Yes. Schaarbeek. We would stay in Bruges though - a lovely town.

    5 and a half hours in A&E and still waiting.....

    >< So frustrating. One thing I wish would take place is that you know whereabouts you are in which queue at A&E. It wouldn't cut the time, but knowing that would be helpful. Like there's 1 person triaged ahead of you for the ENT Doctor for instance. Expected wait time 1/2 hr...
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,593
    UK deaths

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  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    dixiedean said:

    rcs1000 said:

    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    ping said:

    140/1 on 40%+ are pretty good odds, too.

    What is the biggest conference bounce on record?

    Not sure. But the biggest one I can recall is my boy Dave turning a 10% Lab lead into an 8% Con lead during the 2007 conferences.

    It was when Brown was thinking of calling a snap election.

    One of Brown’s MPs even wrote this seldom mentioned piece during those heady days.

    'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
    The trick is to win the elections, not the conferences.
    Dave won every general election he contested as leader.
    Depending what you mean by won. Con maj 2010 was there for the taking.
    Most seats/most votes counts as a victory.

    The fact he became PM means it was a victory.

    As this puts Dave’s achievement into context.



    Somewhat remarkable Heath got to fight 1970 from those figures.
    In those days - and really up until the end of Kinnock post-1987 - you got to keep fighting General Elections until you won. What proportion of Conservative and Labour leaders between 1945 and 1990 did not end up Prime Minister?

    It has to be well under 20%.

    Good point. Can only think of Gaitskell. For unfortunate reasons. And Foot for more obvious ones. Not a single Tory. Wonder what changed? I would argue, Kinnock too was a special case, losing an election pretty comfortably he was widely expected to win.
    Tories under Blair really started the ditching the leader after one defeat. Or none in IDS' case.

    Edit. Oops. You've covered that.
    So, who was the Tory leader before Hague never to be PM?
    19th Century I reckon.
    I don't think there was one. The modern Conservative Party started with Peel, and every leader until Hague had at least a little time in Number Ten.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,593
    UK R

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This discussion has been closed.