You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
We cannot even get agreement from parliamentarians to stop parliament falling to bits while they work in it, can't say I have much more confidence in someone properly demolishing and replacing that site.
Sad that the dome is taking a battering, but relieved that Eunice decided to wait until after I went there last weekend.
Anyway, that venue brings a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. Unlike the Palace of Westminster. And I wouldn't like to bet which of the two buildings will remaining standing for the longest, at the rate things are going.
I love the Houses of Parliament and consider it a globally iconic structure that must be preserved ideally as a working parliament, but it does seem to have been put together pretty shoddily, as the bulk of it is not very old.
I've started to believe that the attention being lavished on Big Ben, whilst the remainder of the structure is left to rot, is part of some kind of conspiracy. As I said a few days back, if/when that complex finally catches fire, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the tenders were directed to the clock tower, and perhaps Westminster Hall, and the rest of it was allowed to burn, basically.
There was once a dilapidated old pub just down the road from where my Dad now lives. The owners wanted to pull it down and put a nice new convenience store with some flats over it on the site, but they were having trouble with the planning authorities.
One night the pub mysteriously caught fire and was destroyed. After that the planning problems went away. The site is now home to a nice new convenience store with some flats over it.
A new Parliament would be more modern, spacious and comfortable, it would quite possibly cost less to throw up from scratch than to painstakingly remodel the existing building, and the cost would also be much less of a political embarrassment because clearly money would have to be spent on its construction once the old one had burnt to the ground. I think at least some of the politicians would be thrilled if, one night, it mysteriously caught fire.
There's that Sherlock Holmes line about "eliminate the impossible; whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Utter tosh outside the puzzle piece world of detective fiction. The trouble the UK has is that pretty much every option looks, if not impossible, implausible.
Staus quo is implausible- a hefty majority think Brexit is going badly, a comfy plurality think it's a mistake, a significant minority would rejoin tomorrow given a chance. In democratic politics (unlike family mis-planning), we seek to reverse mistakes.
A Brexit on top of the Brexit is implausible- it does nothing to solve the actual problems.
Full-fat rejoin is implausible- partly because of Schengen and the Euro, partly because of the mutual lack of trust, partly because Brexit is all some Boomers have achieved in their lives and they are desperate to protect their legacy.
EEA, even EEA-alike, is implausible- it's one thing for Norway (population 5 million) to give up its direct political input to have more independent action. The idea that the UK (population 70 million) could do the same and not experience it as an embarassment is for the birds. Whatever it is, it's not Taking Back Control.
And yet, once the Hannan fantasy of the UK leading some other like-minded nations out of the EU (with the UK leading, natch), those are basically the full spectrum of options. All of them are implausible to impossible, and yet one of them (or something like them) has to happen next.
All are implausible, none impossible. The Holmes dictum (which veers towards the truth but is incomplete - you need to add that only one option is left after the impossible is eliminated) is not a starter here.
The specific island of Ireland situation is slightly different. Without a radical reconfiguration all the solutions are impossible. Which is why even provisional finality has not been achieved. It's immovable object v irresistible force.
(When will the SNP wake up the to fact that their plans present an even worse example of it?)
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
We cannot even get agreement from parliamentarians to stop parliament falling to bits while they work in it, can't say I have much more confidence in someone properly demolishing and replacing that site.
Sad that the dome is taking a battering, but relieved that Eunice decided to wait until after I went there last weekend.
Anyway, that venue brings a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. Unlike the Palace of Westminster. And I wouldn't like to bet which of the two buildings will remaining standing for the longest, at the rate things are going.
I love the Houses of Parliament and consider it a globally iconic structure that must be preserved ideally as a working parliament, but it does seem to have been put together pretty shoddily, as the bulk of it is not very old.
In a lot of old buildings the biggest current piece of current repair work is repairing the incorrect decisions made when the last set of repairs was done.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
Did New Labour build the O2?
Major's government came up with the concept for the structure. New Labour built it and put in the (extremely naff) contents, which was dumped long ago.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
Did New Labour build the O2?
The original plan was under the Major government, but Blair expanded the scope of the exhibition.
I wonder how long the structure was expected to last? They were expecting the Eiffel Tower to be dismantled after the 1889 World’s Fair, and it’s still very much there!
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
For some people on the right, that makes it even worse.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
Did New Labour build the O2?
The original panning for the Millenium Celebrations started under Major. The O2 was a giant semi-temporary structure - tented semi-permanents were just coming in a big way in architecture, bit like giant greenhouses and Paxton, back in the day...
So the structure was largely decided under Major. The complete disaster of the interior exhibition was very New Labour. The original plan was something on the lines of the Great Exhibition - best of British over the last 1k years or similar. That got chucked out as not very Cool Britannia.....
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents.
Totally agree. Vacuous and the worst kind of New Labour guff.
But it's now an iconic and superb concert venue and a pretty recognisable London landmark.
LOL at the plane spotter guy taking calls from mainstream media, who appear to be wanting him to drop what he’s doing - with 185,000 watching - to speak to them!
Yup - this where the future lies. MSM is screwed unless they start employing people like him freelance.
Why do we think they were going so hard for Joe Rogan and Spotify?
MSM are losing out to new media, citizen journalists, and people with interesting jobs and hobbies - and don’t know what to do about it!
Started by an interested amateur. Now has insane levels of access to the industry.
Is L2 any good? I keep on umming and ahhing about it, but have herd both good and bad things.
It's like the biggest data dump ever. You may never do anything else, ever again, apart from read it....
Thanks. But I've also heard it's full of the biggest load of bollox out there, with people just inventing sh*t and pretending to work for the companies. How good is the signal to noise ratio?
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Erm, didn't Labour inherit the Millennium Dome project from John Major's Conservative government? iirc there was some discussion as to whether Labour would cancel it.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
How strange. So we should give them all names like Hurricaine Ivan, Stalin or Hitler to make people sufficiently worried about them to take precautions I suppose.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
Did New Labour build the O2?
The original panning for the Millenium Celebrations started under Major. The O2 was a giant semi-temporary structure - tented semi-permanents were just coming in a big way in architecture, bit like giant greenhouses and Paxton, back in the day...
So the structure was largely decided under Major. The complete disaster of the interior exhibition was very New Labour. The original plan was something on the lines of the Great Exhibition - best of British over the last 1k years or similar. That got chucked out as not very Cool Britannia.....
To be frank, I'm not sure that the original scheme of things would have been terribly interesting either. I'm not sure people would have been that desperate to get up and see Stephenson's Rocket or wander around a Spitfire. Individual museums the length and breadth of the UK do that better.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Erm, didn't Labour inherit the Millennium Dome project from John Major's Conservative government? iirc there was some discussion as to whether Labour would cancel it.
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
I initially translated 'da kidz' as overweight middle age blokes in Superdry getting off on music that reminded them of their youth. Maybe that should have been a third concert.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Erm, didn't Labour inherit the Millennium Dome project from John Major's Conservative government? iirc there was some discussion as to whether Labour would cancel it.
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
I'm afraid I agree.
Much as I would love to rejoin the EU I think Starmer knows it would be political suicide to contemplate it.
Maybe another vote in a generation's time but we would probably need to join the euro and who says the EU would even have us back?
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
I initially translated 'da kidz' as overweight middle age blokes in Superdry getting off on music that reminded them of their youth. Maybe that should have been a third concert.
Well yes, but if it was billed as such, they wouldn't come.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
I agree. He needs to say "never" (even if he doesn't mean it).
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
Wasn't it a hurricane that identified as a light storm that got Michael Fish into trouble?
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
Today is a painful reminder of lockdown and home schooling.
13yo's school is closed due to the storm and they have switched to remote working. Although she is using her break times to argue with one of her brothers. 9yo had an inset day before half term. Not going out due to the weather gives lots of opportunity to cause trouble. 4yo's pre-school also closed for the storm.
Hopefully the home schooling will never have to come back!
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
The Alba Party has lumbered into the gender debate and sometimes sloganise that 'a storm is coming'. Maybe this is what they're referring to.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
It *was* entertaining. They hired that mad french guy to run it. He popped up on TV all the time trying to ramp his tent of tat. "Just another crazy day at ze Dome" he said when the place got robbed by bulldozer...
Oh you meant the exhibits entertaining? Screw that, they wanted £20 to come in.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
And the format was also neither a museum, nor a performance, nor a theme-park. So also ended up doing nothing particularly well.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
Wasn't it a hurricane that identified as a light storm that got Michael Fish into trouble?
No. It was the duty forecaster at the Met Office.
Incidentally, the Met Office supercomputer in 1987 had less processing power than today's mobile phones.
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
Nothing - Parliaments do not bind their successors.
Just been out. Windy, brief rain at the start of my walk. Not quite enough that I felt being pushed off my feet, but not far off when the gusts came. Not nearly as cold as I suspected.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
And the format was also neither a museum, nor a performance, nor a theme-park. So also ended up doing nothing particularly well.
And then the performance itself wasn't a concert, or a ballet, or a musical, or a circus, or a play, just a mushy, bland mix of them all.
It really was 'the first page of New Labour's manifesto' as Peter Mandelson declared - just not in the way he hoped.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
It *was* entertaining. They hired that mad french guy to run it. He popped up on TV all the time trying to ramp his tent of tat. "Just another crazy day at ze Dome" he said when the place got robbed by bulldozer...
Oh you meant the exhibits entertaining? Screw that, they wanted £20 to come in.
Brilliant that a guy with a camcorder, microphone, humongous battery and equally humongous data plan, sitting in a field in Hatton, has a quarter of a million people watching him on a stormy day.
My family is from Hounslow and when I was young I had an aunt who lived at the end of the runway. It was like an earthquake every few minutes, even back then.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
(a) EU membership - by and large - is not something that most people want to refight right now and (b) Starmer only really needs to be slightly more pro-EU than the Conservative Party to cause them some trouble in this area - because where else are pro-EU voters going to go?
Indeed, I think the second of these issues is a headache for the Conservatives. Take me, I'm a Leave voting Eurosceptic, but I also think that triggering Article 16 now would be an enormous act of bad faith by the Government, given that development of the Trusted Trader Programme is now happening at some speed. And when Starmer says things - as in the header, or what he said about the Stop The War nutters - I *could* see myself voting for him.
Fortunately, Ms Rayner jumps up and prevents it *actually* happening.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
The transport now is fantastic. The brilliant Jubilee line and even the boat which my partner has taken after a concert.
Actually if you're a driver, the parking right on site is also brilliant. I picked up the kids from a Drake concert as easy as anything.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
We cannot even get agreement from parliamentarians to stop parliament falling to bits while they work in it, can't say I have much more confidence in someone properly demolishing and replacing that site.
Sad that the dome is taking a battering, but relieved that Eunice decided to wait until after I went there last weekend.
Anyway, that venue brings a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. Unlike the Palace of Westminster. And I wouldn't like to bet which of the two buildings will remaining standing for the longest, at the rate things are going.
I love the Houses of Parliament and consider it a globally iconic structure that must be preserved ideally as a working parliament, but it does seem to have been put together pretty shoddily, as the bulk of it is not very old.
I've started to believe that the attention being lavished on Big Ben, whilst the remainder of the structure is left to rot, is part of some kind of conspiracy. As I said a few days back, if/when that complex finally catches fire, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the tenders were directed to the clock tower, and perhaps Westminster Hall, and the rest of it was allowed to burn, basically.
There was once a dilapidated old pub just down the road from where my Dad now lives. The owners wanted to pull it down and put a nice new convenience store with some flats over it on the site, but they were having trouble with the planning authorities.
One night the pub mysteriously caught fire and was destroyed. After that the planning problems went away. The site is now home to a nice new convenience store with some flats over it.
A new Parliament would be more modern, spacious and comfortable, it would quite possibly cost less to throw up from scratch than to painstakingly remodel the existing building, and the cost would also be much less of a political embarrassment because clearly money would have to be spent on its construction once the old one had burnt to the ground. I think at least some of the politicians would be thrilled if, one night, it mysteriously caught fire.
You’d think it would be cheaper to keep the facade and rebuild everything inside
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
I'm afraid I agree.
Much as I would love to rejoin the EU I think Starmer knows it would be political suicide to contemplate it.
Maybe another vote in a generation's time but we would probably need to join the euro and who says the EU would even have us back?
Exactly, the EU is now increasingly focused on its inner core of the Eurozone. With the EU having its own President, Parliament, court and currency and increasingly its own foreign policy it only wants members committed to an EU superstate which we are not.
There is more chance in my view of non Eurozone nations like Sweden and Denmark and Poland leaving the EU and just staying in the EEA than there is of the UK rejoining the full EU
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
I agree. He needs to say "never" (even if he doesn't mean it).
Saying "never" and not meaning it would be outrageous. Might as well continue voting for Johnson if we want a pants on fire PM.
(a) EU membership - by and large - is not something that most people want to refight right now and (b) Starmer only really needs to be slightly more pro-EU than the Conservative Party to cause them some trouble in this area - because where else are pro-EU voters going to go?
Indeed, I think the second of these issues is a headache for the Conservatives. Take me, I'm a Leave voting Eurosceptic, but I also think that triggering Article 16 now would be an enormous act of bad faith by the Government, given that development of the Trusted Trader Programme is now happening at some speed. And when Starmer says things - as in the header, or what he said about the Stop The War nutters - I *could* see myself voting for him.
Fortunately, Ms Rayner jumps up and prevents it *actually* happening.
Angela Rayner too Blairite for you in her condemnation of low-level nuisance crime that blights the lives of many? Remember the idea of marching hooligans to ATMs? Hug-a-hoodie was a Conservative policy.
(a) EU membership - by and large - is not something that most people want to refight right now and (b) Starmer only really needs to be slightly more pro-EU than the Conservative Party to cause them some trouble in this area - because where else are pro-EU voters going to go?
Indeed, I think the second of these issues is a headache for the Conservatives. Take me, I'm a Leave voting Eurosceptic, but I also think that triggering Article 16 now would be an enormous act of bad faith by the Government, given that development of the Trusted Trader Programme is now happening at some speed. And when Starmer says things - as in the header, or what he said about the Stop The War nutters - I *could* see myself voting for him.
Fortunately, Ms Rayner jumps up and prevents it *actually* happening.
Yes, of my three red lines both Labour and the Tories are on the correct side of two. If Starmer can kick the gender rights mentalists out of the party I'd easily vote Labour.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
The opening ceremony was great. Pretty much everyone thought so at the time. It’s aged pretty well, too.
You’re very much in a minority, thinking it was risible.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
Oh I thought the opening ceremony was incredible, so did most observers around the world. Never heard anyone diss it before.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
It was great if you lived in London and could just jump on the Jubilee Line. But for everyone else, coming from the rest of the country mostly by car, it was a total nightmare.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
It was great if you lived in London and could just jump on the Jubilee Line. But for everyone else, coming from the rest of the country mostly by car, it was a total nightmare.
The Dome would have been better off not being in London.
But it's the right policy. What's he supposed to do - put up a bad policy and try to justify something he doesn't believe in?
Those who imagine we are rejoining the EU are deluded. The EU wouldn't let us back in, and even if they did it would be on much worse terms than we previously enjoyed.
It's over. Forget it. Starmer is right to move the Party on.
No, you’re wrong. There may be a window in the late 20s (Starmer’s presumed term as PM) when it might be done. As in: Rejoin.
Imagine. The economy is tanking. Migration has plunged. Trade is still suffering. Suddenly Rejoin looks tempting to 65% of the population? What right-minded politician would ignore that?
It’s not probable but it’s far from impossible
It also solves ongoing Irish problems and shoots dead any indyref2
Starmer should finesse his position. ‘No one wants to talk about Brexit now, we need to focus on making life better for blah blah’. Sound brexity but keep options open
After about 2030 we will be so distant from the EU Rejoin will be impossible. You can already feel the Channel widening
Speaking as a Remainer it would be a terrible mistake to rejoin the EU from a position of weakness. It would only lead to a renewed push to leave again once the country had regained some confidence.
If we sort ourselves out while outside the EU then we can negotiate from a position of strength. I'd rather negotiate a genuine Union between Britain and the EU, rather than simply us joining their club. That can't happen from a position of weakness.
"Not in the next Parliament" is all that Starmer needs to say.
That won’t hold.
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
Nothing - Parliaments do not bind their successors.
True, but not what a significant chunk of the population are ready to hear yet.
(And I'm not sure that Rejoin has to happen by 2030. What does have to happen is a bend in the trajectory, even if it's only one of those gentle nudges that boffins plan to use to stop asteroids hitting Earth and killing us all.)
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
Oh I thought the opening ceremony was incredible, so did most observers around the world. Never heard anyone diss it before.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
Oh I thought the opening ceremony was incredible, so did most observers around the world. Never heard anyone diss it before.
I've heard various people trying to diss the Olympics before - as retro active thing.
No-one at the time said so.
The latest one I had was someone trying to make scandal about the rowing lake, and the fact that Eton made a profit on that.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
Wasn't it a hurricane that identified as a light storm that got Michael Fish into trouble?
The record breaking IOW gust this morning was at Category 3 hurricane speed - but of course it was just a gust. If one that destroyed the top of my roof and came close to doing the same to the conservatory.
I was in Boston when Sandy hit New York, the difference was that Sandy was continuous, relentless high winds, such that you couldn’t walk down the street without finding things to hold on to. Whereas the storm we just had gusted about with bursts doing the damage while the rest of the time wind speed was much lower.
It's some sort of progress; however, given how many hundreds of coal fired power stations the Chinese and Indians are likely to have built over those seven years, perhaps not a revolutionary development?
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
The Dome was on the Underground from the day it opened. The bigger problem is that it's at the end of a peninsula so road access - by car or bus - is far from ideal.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
Wasn't it a hurricane that identified as a light storm that got Michael Fish into trouble?
The record breaking IOW gust this morning was at Category 3 hurricane speed - but of course it was just a gust. If one that destroyed the top of my roof and came close to doing the same to the conservatory.
I was in Boston when Sandy hit New York, the difference was that Sandy was continuous, relentless high winds, such that you couldn’t walk down the street without finding things to hold on to. Whereas the storm we just had gusted about with bursts doing the damage while the rest of the time wind speed was much lower.
Worth noting that, even ignoring that hurricanes are (as you point out) much larger and more consistent weather systems, definitions of strength are still based on maximum sustained (usually over a minute) wind speeds. A Cat 3 storm will still have occasional gusts well in excess of the stated speed.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
Oh I thought the opening ceremony was incredible, so did most observers around the world. Never heard anyone diss it before.
95% of the opening ceremony was incredible. The NHS section was risible.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
It was great if you lived in London and could just jump on the Jubilee Line. But for everyone else, coming from the rest of the country mostly by car, it was a total nightmare.
The Dome would have been better off not being in London.
It's some sort of progress; however, given how many hundreds of coal fired power stations the Chinese and Indians are likely to have built over those seven years, perhaps not a revolutionary development?
China is hoping to move from coal to gas courtesy of that nice Mr Putin and proposed sanctions that might stop its sale to Germany.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
The opening ceremony was brilliant. The closing, not so much.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
Oh I thought the opening ceremony was incredible, so did most observers around the world. Never heard anyone diss it before.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
It's some sort of progress; however, given how many hundreds of coal fired power stations the Chinese and Indians are likely to have built over those seven years, perhaps not a revolutionary development?
China is hoping to move from coal to gas courtesy of that nice Mr Putin and proposed sanctions that might stop its sale to Germany.
There is only very limited gas pipeline capacity between Russia and China. (Although I can't help notice that earlier this month, the Chinese entered into a 30 year deal to buy Russian gas through a yet to be built pipeline.)
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
Just had a 3 hour power cut - longest I can remember. A few tiles blown off the roof, branches blown off trees, rubbish blowing around on the roads etc. Fortunately I bought some matches last night and we have a gas cooker - my instinct that it would be a 'false alarm' proved wrong.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
I can't imagine why anyone would.
Been twice, both times for comedy performances. Most recent was for Monty Python Live (Mostly) Five Down, One To Go. That was a good night, but it was good because it was Monty Python more than for the O2 itself.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
So you've never been to a Radiohead gig.
Yesterday, @HYUFD was talking about how University would be the highpoint of most Oxford graduates' lives. I said that I went to Cambridge, and enjoyed it, but that I've had higher higlights.
Live music is one of those highlights.
Radiohead at Victoria Park during the In Rainbows tour was one highlight. Likewise at Sheperds Bush during HTTH.
I've been to a couple of utterly sublime The National concerts too.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
The major problem in 2000 is the Millennium Dome was almost impossible to get to. The transport infrastructure wasn't there. The same issue doomed the private sector London Arena.
It was great if you lived in London and could just jump on the Jubilee Line. But for everyone else, coming from the rest of the country mostly by car, it was a total nightmare.
I remember being my Borough’s representative at a London-wide committee when the folks who were managing the dome project, in the run up to the turn of the Millenium, came along to present us their proposal. One of their slides was a map of the Uk regions with their estimate of the number of visitors from each region who would visit the dome during 2000.
I took a look at their data and my immediate reaction was that the figures were absurd - even for distant regions like the North, Wales and Scotland they’d assumed that something like a third of the entire population would make the trip to docklands to see the exhibition during the first year. My guess was that they’d worked out how many visitors they’d need to break even, and worked backwards allocating them across the country.
So I piped up and said that I thought that their estimates were ridiculous. Honestly, after I’d finished you could hear tumbleweed blowing through the room, then I got a waffly answer that didn’t really address the issue, and the meeting moved on.
Hearing later that the whole project had made a humongous loss because visitor numbers fell way short of expectations came as no surprise.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
The Olympics was great because the facilities were pretty good and Londoners embraced the Olympics. The actual parts of the project that had any political oversight (such as the God-awful logo, opening ceremony, and hideous mascots) were risible.
The opening ceremony was brilliant. The closing, not so much.
Closing ceremonies are always pretty crap, aren't they?
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
So you've never been to a Radiohead gig.
Yesterday, @HYUFD was talking about how University would be the highpoint of most Oxford graduates' lives. I said that I went to Cambridge, and enjoyed it, but that I've had higher higlights.
Live music is one of those highlights.
Radiohead at Victoria Park during the In Rainbows tour was one highlight. Likewise at Sheperds Bush during HTTH.
I've been to a couple of utterly sublime The National concerts too.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
So you've never been to a Radiohead gig.
Yesterday, @HYUFD was talking about how University would be the highpoint of most Oxford graduates' lives. I said that I went to Cambridge, and enjoyed it, but that I've had higher higlights.
Live music is one of those highlights.
Radiohead at Victoria Park during the In Rainbows tour was one highlight. Likewise at Sheperds Bush during HTTH.
I've been to a couple of utterly sublime The National concerts too.
What was that band that I think @Richard_Tyndall and some others were going on about that was so good - a name something like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.
As for concerts my very first was seeing The Jam at Poplar Town Hall and standing on Poplar tube station afterwards as some skinheads ran through it hitting people at random (but not me for some unknown reason).
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
Wasn't the Dome a Major wheeze?
The Dome wasn't the issue imo, it was the contents. A better plan would have been to build the thing as an arena in the first place, and just put on 'the Millenium show' there. Which imo should have been just like the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo crossed with Andre Rieux crossed with the Disney Parade crossed with Last Night of the Proms.
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
The major problem with the exhibition in 2000 is that Mandelson et al couldn't decide whether it should be educational or entertaining. So it ended up being neither.
It *was* entertaining. They hired that mad french guy to run it. He popped up on TV all the time trying to ramp his tent of tat. "Just another crazy day at ze Dome" he said when the place got robbed by bulldozer...
Oh you meant the exhibits entertaining? Screw that, they wanted £20 to come in.
£20 to come in? SeanT would be able to say if that's value or not...
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Let's hope we don't have a trans hurricane then. The confusion would be immense, as people tried to decide whether there was a safe space.
Wasn't it a hurricane that identified as a light storm that got Michael Fish into trouble?
No. It was the duty forecaster at the Met Office.
Incidentally, the Met Office supercomputer in 1987 had less processing power than today's mobile phones.
The most remarkable factoid about the current storm is that its severity was predicted, by the climatic models, before it had even formed as an entity on the weather map. Such are the advances that have been made in long range weather forecasting over the past decade.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
You'd end up going from an intact eyesore to a dilapidated eyesore, hardly an improvement.
Demolish it and build something useful on the site.
It's a pretty impressive concert venue. Guessing you don't like it just because it was New Labour? I mean it was vacuous Blair vanity at the time but certainly isn't now.
I think it would be a shame to dismantle everything about Cool Britannia. It was the last occasion when Britain had anything Great about it. All downhill since.
PMSL.
So that joke of a site is more "Great" than the 2012 Olympics to name a more recent example?
You're a joke.
Come on Philip. Is that kind of aggression really necessary? The 02 is an amazing concert venue. I doubt from your post that you've ever been.
I think the Olympics was amazing. Not a venue as such but amazing. That was also a Cool Britannia outcome and owed a huge amount to Tessa Jowell amongst others (whatever Boris tried to claim).
Leave off the personal abuse okay?
I've been a couple of times, I wasn't that impressed with it. I wouldn't say it was an "amazing" concert venue.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
I've seen four events at the O2 - The Who, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon/Sting, and The Avengers Live.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
So you've never been to a Radiohead gig.
Yesterday, @HYUFD was talking about how University would be the highpoint of most Oxford graduates' lives. I said that I went to Cambridge, and enjoyed it, but that I've had higher higlights.
Live music is one of those highlights.
Radiohead at Victoria Park during the In Rainbows tour was one highlight. Likewise at Sheperds Bush during HTTH.
I've been to a couple of utterly sublime The National concerts too.
Best gig I ever went to was the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Hyde Park in June 2004.
The band were fantastic, but one of the warm up acts was James Brown, and oh my god, he was fantastic, had so much energy for someone in his 70s, he had 100,000 people jumping up and down that day.
Starmer just needs to give enough to the unreconciled remainers for them to reluctantly vote labour in marginal constituencies to get the Tories out. The reality is that they have had their opportunity to overturn the result in the aftermath of the referendum and they failed to persuade the wider electorate of their case.
A bigger problem for Starmer is potentially the stop the war pacifists. They have a lot of support in the wider population, who are lukewarm about conflict with Russia.
Comments
There was once a dilapidated old pub just down the road from where my Dad now lives. The owners wanted to pull it down and put a nice new convenience store with some flats over it on the site, but they were having trouble with the planning authorities.
One night the pub mysteriously caught fire and was destroyed. After that the planning problems went away. The site is now home to a nice new convenience store with some flats over it.
A new Parliament would be more modern, spacious and comfortable, it would quite possibly cost less to throw up from scratch than to painstakingly remodel the existing building, and the cost would also be much less of a political embarrassment because clearly money would have to be spent on its construction once the old one had burnt to the ground. I think at least some of the politicians would be thrilled if, one night, it mysteriously caught fire.
The specific island of Ireland situation is slightly different. Without a radical reconfiguration all the solutions are impossible. Which is why even provisional finality has not been achieved. It's immovable object v irresistible force.
(When will the SNP wake up the to fact that their plans present an even worse example of it?)
https://twitter.com/macaesbruno/status/1494662462465101831?s=21
In actual fact, you could have done what they did for the Queen's Golden Jubilee concerts, have two - have a rockier one for 'da kidz' and a more classical one for the crumblies.
Even if it had had to close early due to lack of interest, there would have been no issue, just put a different show on our sell the site early. Easy to say with hindsight.
I wonder how long the structure was expected to last? They were expecting the Eiffel Tower to be dismantled after the 1889 World’s Fair, and it’s still very much there!
So the structure was largely decided under Major. The complete disaster of the interior exhibition was very New Labour. The original plan was something on the lines of the Great Exhibition - best of British over the last 1k years or similar. That got chucked out as not very Cool Britannia.....
But it's now an iconic and superb concert venue and a pretty recognisable London landmark.
"Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action."
Scooped by @Malmesbury
“What are you hiding from us Mr Starmer?”
Much as I would love to rejoin the EU I think Starmer knows it would be political suicide to contemplate it.
Maybe another vote in a generation's time but we would probably need to join the euro and who says the EU would even have us back?
13yo's school is closed due to the storm and they have switched to remote working. Although she is using her break times to argue with one of her brothers.
9yo had an inset day before half term. Not going out due to the weather gives lots of opportunity to cause trouble.
4yo's pre-school also closed for the storm.
Hopefully the home schooling will never have to come back!
'Wind must be kept out of woman's toilets!'
Oh you meant the exhibits entertaining? Screw that, they wanted £20 to come in.
Incidentally, the Met Office supercomputer in 1987 had less processing power than today's mobile phones.
It really was 'the first page of New Labour's manifesto' as Peter Mandelson declared - just not in the way he hoped.
However my wife loved the fact that they had a Spur restaurant there last time we went, so I'll give them credit for that. No idea if its still there or not.
(a) EU membership - by and large - is not something that most people want to refight right now
and
(b) Starmer only really needs to be slightly more pro-EU than the Conservative Party to cause them some trouble in this area - because where else are pro-EU voters going to go?
Indeed, I think the second of these issues is a headache for the Conservatives. Take me, I'm a Leave voting Eurosceptic, but I also think that triggering Article 16 now would be an enormous act of bad faith by the Government, given that development of the Trusted Trader Programme is now happening at some speed. And when Starmer says things - as in the header, or what he said about the Stop The War nutters - I *could* see myself voting for him.
Fortunately, Ms Rayner jumps up and prevents it *actually* happening.
Actually if you're a driver, the parking right on site is also brilliant. I picked up the kids from a Drake concert as easy as anything.
Boris Johnson was involved I believe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Air_Line_(cable_car)
There is more chance in my view of non Eurozone nations like Sweden and Denmark and Poland leaving the EU and just staying in the EEA than there is of the UK rejoining the full EU
You’re very much in a minority, thinking it was risible.
Danny Boyle done good.
Hope the weapons procurement is better than the buildings procurement…
(And I'm not sure that Rejoin has to happen by 2030. What does have to happen is a bend in the trajectory, even if it's only one of those gentle nudges that boffins plan to use to stop asteroids hitting Earth and killing us all.)
No-one at the time said so.
The latest one I had was someone trying to make scandal about the rowing lake, and the fact that Eton made a profit on that.
https://twitter.com/luckyma_man/status/1494653514911465482?s=20&t=my5R7xIAQNU_pCrlnEGSNg
I was in Boston when Sandy hit New York, the difference was that Sandy was continuous, relentless high winds, such that you couldn’t walk down the street without finding things to hold on to. Whereas the storm we just had gusted about with bursts doing the damage while the rest of the time wind speed was much lower.
In it she says it is NOT normal procedure to allow individuals to see notes made during an internal investigation into them.
But she feels the circumstances warrant “exceptional” measures.👇 https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1494679769316827145/photo/1
Brexit is done and going swimmingly.
If I were to give a single piece of advice, one to live by, it would be never watch "The Avengers Live". It was perhaps the worst two hours of my life.
Been twice, both times for comedy performances. Most recent was for Monty Python Live (Mostly) Five Down, One To Go. That was a good night, but it was good because it was Monty Python more than for the O2 itself.
Live music is one of those highlights.
Radiohead at Victoria Park during the In Rainbows tour was one highlight. Likewise at Sheperds Bush during HTTH.
I've been to a couple of utterly sublime The National concerts too.
I took a look at their data and my immediate reaction was that the figures were absurd - even for distant regions like the North, Wales and Scotland they’d assumed that something like a third of the entire population would make the trip to docklands to see the exhibition during the first year. My guess was that they’d worked out how many visitors they’d need to break even, and worked backwards allocating them across the country.
So I piped up and said that I thought that their estimates were ridiculous. Honestly, after I’d finished you could hear tumbleweed blowing through the room, then I got a waffly answer that didn’t really address the issue, and the meeting moved on.
Hearing later that the whole project had made a humongous loss because visitor numbers fell way short of expectations came as no surprise.
Seeing Paradise Lost this evening...
As for concerts my very first was seeing The Jam at Poplar Town Hall and standing on Poplar tube station afterwards as some skinheads ran through it hitting people at random (but not me for some unknown reason).
I think @isam and I swapped similar anecdotes.
.
The band were fantastic, but one of the warm up acts was James Brown, and oh my god, he was fantastic, had so much energy for someone in his 70s, he had 100,000 people jumping up and down that day.
A bigger problem for Starmer is potentially the stop the war pacifists. They have a lot of support in the wider population, who are lukewarm about conflict with Russia.