Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

This sums up the current Tory Party – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 12,114
edited October 2023 in General
This sums up the current Tory Party – politicalbetting.com

I walked into Conference earlier with @Nigel_Farage. He got quite the reception. I'm convinced party members would choose him as leader if they could.

Read the full story here

«1345

Comments

  • With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...
  • Can we bet on the next Conservative leader admitting and ennobling Lord Farage?
  • Eton’s new provost will restore balance after woke shift, say campaigners
    Sir Nicholas Coleridge hailed as a beacon of 'Enlightenment values' in contrast with head master who has tried to 'decolonise' curriculum

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/02/new-eton-provost-sir-nicholas-coleridge-will-restore-school/ (£££)

    This is the important news. Sir Nick replaces woke lefty Lord Waldegrave who served in Jeremy Corbyn's Mrs Thatcher's and John Major's Cabinets.
  • Can we bet on the next Conservative leader admitting and ennobling Lord Farage?

    If Wigbricant has his way apparently! Talk about painting yourself into a corner.
  • SNP rebels in talks with Tories to bring down Greens’ coalition, Douglas Ross reveals
    Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,028

    SNP rebels in talks with Tories to bring down Greens’ coalition, Douglas Ross reveals
    Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)

    Well, they’re hardly bloody secret then are they?
  • El_CapitanoEl_Capitano Posts: 4,238
    edited October 2023
    David Frost as Conservative leader would be magnificent. I would consider joining the party simply to vote for him. Make it happen, I implore you.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,362
    ydoethur said:

    SNP rebels in talks with Tories to bring down Greens’ coalition, Douglas Ross reveals
    Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)

    Well, they’re hardly bloody secret then are they?
    Did Douglas Ross go to Cambridge?
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,163
    What's the source for Liz Truss having leadership ambitions?
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    "Suella Braverman will announce today a lifetime ban on sex offenders changing their name and gender in an attempt to close a loophole that is allowing criminals to evade the sex offence register."

    It has cross-party support. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP, has long campaigned for this. So I hope it goes through.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,705

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    Forget the agrarian stuff. Ukraine has one of the largest deposits of rare earth metals in Europe. No wonder Russia wants it.

    It is another reason why Russia must not win. Worse even than the implosion of the Tories is the US being forced to freeze aid to Ukraine because of the Republicans. The US - if Trump wins again - will not be a trusted partner. Indeed it may actually turn into a malign player. We will have to pay a lot more for our defence - something our politicians have not really come to terms with. Or voters.
  • Eabhal said:

    ydoethur said:

    SNP rebels in talks with Tories to bring down Greens’ coalition, Douglas Ross reveals
    Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)

    Well, they’re hardly bloody secret then are they?
    Did Douglas Ross go to Cambridge?
    Was he called to the bar? ;)
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    Cyclefree said:

    "Suella Braverman will announce today a lifetime ban on sex offenders changing their name and gender in an attempt to close a loophole that is allowing criminals to evade the sex offence register."

    It has cross-party support. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP, has long campaigned for this. So I hope it goes through.

    I’d be fairly certain that such a ban will be struck down on human rights grounds.

    A more workable solution would be a protection order, applied as part of sentencing, that the offender can’t enter various women only spaces. Breach that and straight back to prison the finish their full sentence.

    Come to think of it, there might well be the legal framework to do such already - is there?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993

    What's the source for Liz Truss having leadership ambitions?

    She's on the list in the Grauniad along with Suella, Kemi, Priti, Penny, Tugs, and Cleverly.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    Compromise, like crevice is a dirty word, Blackadder….

    To this day, large chunks of the Labour Party regard New Labour as a horror best forgotten.

    One pure doctrine! one pure land! one pure leader! is the fashionable cry, in politics. It is better if the party is reduced to one voter than…. Etc etc
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 10,640
    edited October 2023
    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely
  • Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    Indeed, well put.
    Unless, somehow (but unlikely), the Cons can drag themselves back to at least somewhere closer to sanity they're even more sunk than they already are. Diving down the rabbit hole of narrow evermore right wing policy will put them straight down said rabbit hole for years and make them increasingly irrelevant in the public eye 👁️
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    It is generally forgotten that the Karyn massacres were designed to do exactly that to Poland. Decapitate the country politically and culturally.

    Pre Poland, like all of Europe, had compulsory military service. As part of this, anyone with a degree was automatically made an officer. So killing all the officers in the Polish army was as much about killing the educated middle and upper class as anything else.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,362
    Should we invite India to colonise us and build a decent recent railway system?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,356
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/02/sunak-fails-to-hand-whatsapp-messages-from-time-as-chancellor-to-covid-inquiry

    I too have had several phone changes since I started WhatsApp in 2018, yet can access all messages since my groups started.

    It is really quite hard to see this as anything other than deliberate obstruction of the enquiry, against the specific ruling in the courts.

  • MonksfieldMonksfield Posts: 2,777

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    There can be no peace with Putin’s Russia. If we were to abandon Ukraine now, the shame would echo for longer than Chamberlain’s.
  • MonksfieldMonksfield Posts: 2,777
    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    Cyclefree said:

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    Forget the agrarian stuff...
    I think that misses the point.

    This is a scheme (admittedly not formal government policy) for destroying Ukraine as a polity forever. It proposes destruction of road and rail networks; power stations; industry and "large settlements".
    A political rather than economic plan, of a drastic kind, which is why I called it a Generalplan Westen.

    No doubt exploitation of mineral resources would also happen.


  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    Nigelb said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    Forget the agrarian stuff...
    I think that misses the point.

    This is a scheme (admittedly not formal government policy) for destroying Ukraine as a polity forever. It proposes destruction of road and rail networks; power stations; industry and "large settlements".
    A political rather than economic plan, of a drastic kind, which is why I called it a Generalplan Westen.

    No doubt exploitation of mineral resources would also happen.


    Did they just Google translate it from the original German?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993
    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    What also sums up the Tory party ?

    A Chancellor, whose party has been in government for almost the entire saga of HS2, telling journalists that "we need to ask how costs have got out of hand".
  • Trumpite Tory London mayor candidate Susan Hall’s attempt to weaponise anti-Semitism against Sadiq Khan has failed spectacularly.

    https://x.com/boardofdeputies/status/1708977693859971577?s=46&t=rw5lNVUgmRPVyKpxfV_pPQ

    There is so much to criticise Khan for, but Hall’s main problem is clearly not what he’s done, but who he is.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    Truss wont be leader FFS. It’s gonna be Badenoch, Mordaunt or Cleverley.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Trumpite Tory London mayor candidate Susan Hall’s attempt to weaponise anti-Semitism against Sadiq Khan has failed spectacularly.

    https://x.com/boardofdeputies/status/1708977693859971577?s=46&t=rw5lNVUgmRPVyKpxfV_pPQ

    There is so much to criticise Khan for, but Hall’s main problem is clearly not what he’s done, but who he is.

    The astonishing thing is that the useless Susan Hall is within two polling points of Khan. Her best bet is to shut her mouth, say nothing, and let Khan bumble and bore his way to defeat. London is tired of Khan. Third terms are really bad ideas in general
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    edited October 2023

    Cyclefree said:

    "Suella Braverman will announce today a lifetime ban on sex offenders changing their name and gender in an attempt to close a loophole that is allowing criminals to evade the sex offence register."

    It has cross-party support. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP, has long campaigned for this. So I hope it goes through.

    I’d be fairly certain that such a ban will be struck down on human rights grounds.

    A more workable solution would be a protection order, applied as part of sentencing, that the offender can’t enter various women only spaces. Breach that and straight back to prison the finish their full sentence.

    Come to think of it, there might well be the legal framework to do such already - is there?
    I don't think that's necessarily so. If you read the article in full they've already considered this aspect.

    The issue is not just about women only spaces. It is also to prevent child abusers changing identity and getting into schools with a clean DBS check.

    Currently it is for the sex offender to notify the police of a change of details. If they don't there is no separate check. What's being proposed is that any change notified to government departments (DWP etc) be linked to the DBS scheme so that whatever identity is picked they still remain on the register and still get picked up. It will not be perfect but it will be a lot better than what we have now which relies entirely on criminals being honest with the police. It does not matter what the identity is so long as it stays linked with the sex offender and is picked up by the checks which schools and others have to do.

    Secondly, keeping the legal right to change gender restricted to those with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria will provide some protection. And, finally, not all rights in the ECHR are absolute: public safety and the prevention of crime are balancing factors.

    So, yes, I've found a Suella policy I support - but it is one which appears to be supported by Labour too so let's hope it goes through.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    You say a quarter will vote for them. Just a few years ago, the baseline for both parties was seen as being 30%.

    I'm still expecting a stonking Labour majority, despite Starmer's shortcomings. He doesn't really need to do anything: the Conservative Party will win the GE for him.
  • Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.

    Demographics alone argue against any future Tory landslide if they go even further to the extreme. They have so alienated so much of the working age population that if Labour does win a majority at the next GE, they’ll have to mess up spectacularly not to win another term should the Tories end up with Braverman, Truss or Patel as leader. Badenoch may be another matter as she does seem to have a degree of pragmatism about her.

  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    You say a quarter will vote for them. Just a few years ago, the baseline for both parties was seen as being 30%.

    I'm still expecting a stonking Labour majority, despite Starmer's shortcomings. He doesn't really need to do anything: the Conservative Party will win the GE for him.
    That being so, which I doubt. Consider what comes next should Labour fail.
  • Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    Actually, Patel was sounding pretty calm and reasonable in today's Times;

    Priti Patel, the former home secretary, said any move to cancel the northern leg would be a “pretty drastic step forward”, adding: “I think there’s a lot of questions to ask about how he reached that decision. What kind of work have they done, what kind of analysis, what kind of assumptions? And have they actually gone into all the scenarios around viability?”

    I almost choked on my fruit'n'fibre.

    As for the Conservatives, they have survived a lot in the past. But FPTP has a nasty cliff edge in the high twenties percent. They're not there yet, but they are currently doing St Vitus' Dance near the top of Beachy Head.

    And then there's the age factor. In the past "The Tories will die out" has never happened, they have always replenished. But in the past, the Conservatives have always had fairly solid minority support in younger demographics. This time, they don't.

    I reckon that, if they lose next time, they have two terms to sort it out. Otherwise, there won't be a party to save.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I dunno - will feel better placed to judge this after Labour’s conference. I suspect a reasonable majority but not wipeout. Less than 100 seats would be epochal, and require an all-time high for the LDs - perhaps even making them the official opposition.

    An important point here is where the donor money is heading. Some prominent withdrawals from the Tories, plus I suspect a lot of the campaigning, marketing, and comms strategy talent in CCHQ has suffered a brain drain (nothing from the last 12 months can suggest otherwise).

    Energy and GOTV will likely be weaker among the Blue activist base too (not least because it’s hard to go door-knocking from a bath chair, or it could involve such woke things as using feet to get around) - as we know, this can make a difference in marginals.
  • boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    Yes exactly. The spec is the cost overrun, not the actual works once started. We're building infrastructure to trains which will never run at that speed - and if it get chopped hardly any trains will use it at all. We're building infrastructure which it grossly over-engineered to withstand the breakup of the earth's crust. We're repeatedly changing the design and requirements.

    All of this has huge cost. We're burning so much more cash than any other high speed line in Europe because of the uniquely British way we're building it - stupidly.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.

    Demographics alone argue against any future Tory landslide if they go even further to the extreme. They have so alienated so much of the working age population that if Labour does win a majority at the next GE, they’ll have to mess up spectacularly not to win another term should the Tories end up with Braverman, Truss or Patel as leader. Badenoch may be another matter as she does seem to have a degree of pragmatism about her.

    Yes, I sense Badenoch might be their best choice, for a comeback victory in 2028 (unless they are beaten so badly a comeback is impossible)

    She is different enough to be interesting and have ideas; she’s political enough to see the need for centrism in some areas

    But she’s also a bit of a blank slate. I might be projecting. Need to see more of her to know
  • David Frost as Conservative leader would be magnificent. I would consider joining the party simply to vote for him. Make it happen, I implore you.

    Thats snow chance.
  • Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    There is a cliff edge at which FPTP will start to work pretty strongly against the Tories rather than in favour of them. And it is around that 25% mark. If they get 20% of the vote I suspect they will have less than 10% of the seats.
  • Back to the Tory party for a minute. To listen to ministers is to wonder who has been in power for the last 13 years. They are battling against all kinds of horrors which they claim have been imposed on this great nation against our will by some mysterious party whose identity has become shrouded in mystery.

    Its like when Sunak announced he was banning the meat tax. That the meat tax was a policy proposal made by his own government earlier this year seems to have passed him by. And now other ministers trying to pass off the Tory policy as a Labour policy.

    Perhaps Labour have been in power all along, the shadow government in control of the government which other Tory MPs are now referring to. Even more sinister is that Sir Keith Donkey was apparently running the country before he was an MP.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    .
    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause...

    There was a further interview with the CEO of the company involved in building the Euston terminus - "grossly over-specced".

    Hunt might well ask how costs "got out of hand".

    As an aside, it would have been good had we heard more from these characters at the inception of the project. Though those involved in bidding would no doubt be gagged by "commercial confidentiality" - a concept that government regularly invokes to prevent scrutiny of public projects.

  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 10,640

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    Let’s presume the Conservatives lose the election and elect a new leader, Braverman or Patel or Truss or Badenoch win. On recent behaviour, the Tories will just depose them before the following election anyway!
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,001
    edited October 2023
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216

    David Frost as Conservative leader would be magnificent. I would consider joining the party simply to vote for him. Make it happen, I implore you.

    Thats snow chance.
    Only if hell freezes over ?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    Maybe 25% might vote for Tory. But given the way FPTP works etc that still could end up with them losing a lot, I mean a lot of seats. And a lot of former Tories will simply not vote at all.

    My husband has voted Tory in the past though has since moved to the Lib Dems and Greens on local matters. He works with the local Tories on civic matters and while he likes some of them on an individual basis he thinks the party as a whole is just batshit and simply not worth voting for. Even our retired colonel and lady wife in the village are fed up with them. If the party cannot persuade people like them - traditional conservatives - to vote for them, they're done for. It's not just the batshittery that's putting them off; it's the impression that they can't put their own socks on without help. That's probably much more damaging.

    Incidentally, I'm being urged to become an independent councillor for the town. But I suspect this might be like leaping into a bath of nettles with no clothes on.
  • RazedabodeRazedabode Posts: 3,027
    If Tories are now full UKIP, not sure how it’s really fair that they can continue with a GE relatively soonish to test that theory. Why wait a year when we can embrace it now
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 49,411
    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
  • If Tories are now full UKIP, not sure how it’s really fair that they can continue with a GE relatively soonish to test that theory. Why wait a year when we can embrace it now

    Why? The "15 minute cities are a woke illuminati conspiracy, we'll stop Labour's meat tax and ensure we take your money and stuff it corruptly into our friend's pockets" manifesto won an 80 seat majority.

    Who can forget that amazing PPB in that election campaign. Rishi Sunak, on the lady's doorstep like in Love Actually, going through his message cards saying "I'll stop 20mph speed limits"
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,725

    Can we bet on the next Conservative leader admitting and ennobling Lord Farage?

    How will they do that, as Leader of the Opposition (if s/he is lucky)?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,356

    David Frost as Conservative leader would be magnificent. I would consider joining the party simply to vote for him. Make it happen, I implore you.

    Thats snow chance.
    Are you suggesting that he is too flakey?
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    Yes he needs to be defeated democratically, but also legally if he's guilty. Nobody is above the law.

    To be committing fraud on matters of fact, not subjectivity, absolutely should be taken to court.

    Trump is trying to fudge this by suggesting its all subjective, but some of it absolutely is not. To have reported that the Penthouse of Trump Tower is 3x the area that it really is, is just a lie, not subjective. To claim that measuring area is subjective is just mad. This is literally maths any Maths GCSE pupil ought to be able to do, to be 3x out in a filing is fraud not subjectivity.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
    The end of Free Speech, the reversal of the Enlightenment, the re-racialisation and further division of society, the warping of education to meet Woke goals, the crippling of science for similar reasons, the indoctrination of our kids with mad woke bollocks, the crimping of industry with mad woke “targets”, the deligitimising of western values, history, prestige and pride, and in the end the total annihilation of a woke-weakened west

    Let’s start there
  • On topic its hard to imagine a Tory Party less electable than Rishi "screw the North" Sunak cancelling the first major investment to the North in a long time, while the North hosts his Party Conference.

    But if the Tories were to go for Nigel Farage that would achieve it.

    There was always a big difference between Brexit and UKIP, even if some didn't like to admit it, there were Conservative and liberal reasons to back Brexit. But if the Tories want to become UKIP they deserve UKIP's electoral results - ie next to no MPs elected under FPTP.

    And before HYUFD says it for the 1000th time, no I never voted for Farage to go to Parliament, I never would, he's utterly vile. I voted for him to be expelled from the European Parliament, that's completely different.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,497
    edited October 2023
    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
    The end of Free Speech, the reversal of the Enlightenment, the re-racialisation and further division of society, the warping of education to meet Woke goals, the crippling of science for similar reasons, the indoctrination of our kids with mad woke bollocks, the crimping of industry with mad woke “targets”, the deligitimising of western values, history, prestige and pride, and in the end the total annihilation of a woke-weakened west

    Let’s start there
    To be fair, there is ever growing evidence that it has driven some westerners mad already.....
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,872
    Cyclefree said:

    Anyone who thinks there should be a 'peace' with Russia that contains any of Ukraine should read the link that @Nigelb posted on the previous thread:

    https://twitter.com/mfphhh/status/1703502731959250945

    Basically: a plan to depopulate Ukraine, deport its people to the east, and turn the country into an agrarian land, incapable of being an independent country.

    Forget the agrarian stuff. Ukraine has one of the largest deposits of rare earth metals in Europe. No wonder Russia wants it.

    It is another reason why Russia must not win. Worse even than the implosion of the Tories is the US being forced to freeze aid to Ukraine because of the Republicans. The US - if Trump wins again - will not be a trusted partner. Indeed it may actually turn into a malign player. We will have to pay a lot more for our defence - something our politicians have not really come to terms with. Or voters.
    For that, voters have to agree what we have is both under threat and worth defending. This malaise extends right across the political spectrum and I encounter plenty of (intelligent) centrist who still think Britain spends too much on defence and are a bit embarrassed by the whole thing.

    I think it's much more likely we just take our chances, which of course risks a calamity.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    Yes he needs to be defeated democratically, but also legally if he's guilty. Nobody is above the law.

    To be committing fraud on matters of fact, not subjectivity, absolutely should be taken to court.

    Trump is trying to fudge this by suggesting its all subjective, but some of it absolutely is not. To have reported that the Penthouse of Trump Tower is 3x the area that it really is, is just a lie, not subjective. To claim that measuring area is subjective is just mad. This is literally maths any Maths GCSE pupil ought to be able to do, to be 3x out in a filing is fraud not subjectivity.
    Letitia James is the lawyer leading this

    Here’s what she said when she stood for election five years ago

    “In 2018, Letitia James vowed to use the law as her weapon to remove Donald Trump from office, dubbing him "an illegitimate president for colluding with foreign powers."

    She boldly declared, "We believe he's engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering. Laundering the money from foreign governments here in New York State."

    "Understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end," she emphasized, "but we can only do it if all of you exercise the most fundamental right — the right to vote."”



    She meant: vote for ME

    https://x.com/kanekoathegreat/status/1708936886130217220?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw

    This looks like an ideologically motivated, political attack on Trump because it is. They do this the year before he stands for President? It looks bad because it is bad. Worse, as I say, it is an error

    It will galvanise Trump’s support and make waverers see him as a martyr

    It’s stupid because the indictments against him for electoral interference etc are already in motion and much more powerful
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
    The end of Free Speech, the reversal of the Enlightenment, the re-racialisation and further division of society, the warping of education to meet Woke goals, the crippling of science for similar reasons, the indoctrination of our kids with mad woke bollocks, the crimping of industry with mad woke “targets”, the deligitimising of western values, history, prestige and pride, and in the end the total annihilation of a woke-weakened west

    Let’s start there
    So this Gish gallop of conclusions is missing how "wokeness" leads to these thing, and also automatically assumes all of these things are universally agreed as of value. Can you explain the causal link between what you understand as wokeness and, say, the "reversal of the Enlightenment"? Or "the warping of education to meet Woke goals"? Does Free Speech include the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre, hate speech, libel? It would be useful to know the detail of this journey rather than just the image of a right wing fever dream to understand how "wokeness" achieves all these revolutionary changes.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993
    Leon said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.
    Truss wont be leader FFS. It’s gonna be Badenoch, Mordaunt or Cleverley.
    Has anyone told Liz?

    You spent yesterday diving with Chinese nubiles and clearly missed her candidate's speech
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,325
    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    This is true, but it is also true that the range of thinkable outcomes for the Tories in the next GE is remarkably wide. A decent case can be made for below 100. A decent case can be made for up to around 300. Betting markets reflect this. 'Tory most seats' and 'Sunak to be PM after GE' is about 4/1. Even the odds for a Tory majority are, at about 8/1 (no value there though!) are not out of sight.

    As an aside, in the POTUS election, the three outcomes of Trump, Biden and A N Other are virtually identical probabilities in the betting.

  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,725
    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
    The end of Free Speech, the reversal of the Enlightenment, the re-racialisation and further division of society, the warping of education to meet Woke goals, the crippling of science for similar reasons, the indoctrination of our kids with mad woke bollocks, the crimping of industry with mad woke “targets”, the deligitimising of western values, history, prestige and pride, and in the end the total annihilation of a woke-weakened west

    Let’s start there
    So this Gish gallop of conclusions is missing how "wokeness" leads to these thing, and also automatically assumes all of these things are universally agreed as of value. Can you explain the causal link between what you understand as wokeness and, say, the "reversal of the Enlightenment"? Or "the warping of education to meet Woke goals"? Does Free Speech include the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre, hate speech, libel? It would be useful to know the detail of this journey rather than just the image of a right wing fever dream to understand how "wokeness" achieves all these revolutionary changes.
    Attempting to engage Leon with logic won't get you anywhere.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,197
    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    He has been caught out and will haev to pay eth price as he should if he has been diddling.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    VANILLA PURGE
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    Yes he needs to be defeated democratically, but also legally if he's guilty. Nobody is above the law.

    To be committing fraud on matters of fact, not subjectivity, absolutely should be taken to court.

    Trump is trying to fudge this by suggesting its all subjective, but some of it absolutely is not. To have reported that the Penthouse of Trump Tower is 3x the area that it really is, is just a lie, not subjective. To claim that measuring area is subjective is just mad. This is literally maths any Maths GCSE pupil ought to be able to do, to be 3x out in a filing is fraud not subjectivity.
    Letitia James is the lawyer leading this

    Here’s what she said when she stood for election five years ago

    “In 2018, Letitia James vowed to use the law as her weapon to remove Donald Trump from office, dubbing him "an illegitimate president for colluding with foreign powers."

    She boldly declared, "We believe he's engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering. Laundering the money from foreign governments here in New York State."

    "Understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end," she emphasized, "but we can only do it if all of you exercise the most fundamental right — the right to vote."”



    She meant: vote for ME

    https://x.com/kanekoathegreat/status/1708936886130217220?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw

    This looks like an ideologically motivated, political attack on Trump because it is. They do this the year before he stands for President? It looks bad because it is bad. Worse, as I say, it is an error

    It will galvanise Trump’s support and make waverers see him as a martyr

    It’s stupid because the indictments against him for electoral interference etc are already in motion and much more powerful
    But Trump's not a martyr, he's an accused criminal who seems to have been caught red handed and bang to rights.

    If he's committed fraud, he should be prosecuted for it, agreed?

    Nobody should be above the law, agreed?
  • JohnLilburneJohnLilburne Posts: 6,210
    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
    It's not worth building a high speed line to Birmingham, it's not far enough. It should always have been planned to go to Glasgow.

    I can't help thinking the "cost overrun" is a feature, not a bug, and designed to provide grift for Tory donors.

    It's about time we got back to the central tenet of capitalism, profit is the reward for capitalism and if you fuck up, you lose your shirt.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677

    So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally.

    No, it won't. You can only run 'Block 4' software on F-35s with TR-3 hardware not 'all' F-35s.

    So, the UK is only getting 13 TR-3 jets (ZM170 - ZM182 in procurement lots 15,16 and 17) so those will be the only aircraft than can release the UK specific weapons (Spear, Meteor). The other 34 aircraft might be able to do dumb carriage but they certainly won't be able to target or release the weapon just because the software exists.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    edited October 2023
    Leon said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.

    Demographics alone argue against any future Tory landslide if they go even further to the extreme. They have so alienated so much of the working age population that if Labour does win a majority at the next GE, they’ll have to mess up spectacularly not to win another term should the Tories end up with Braverman, Truss or Patel as leader. Badenoch may be another matter as she does seem to have a degree of pragmatism about her.

    Yes, I sense Badenoch might be their best choice, for a comeback victory in 2028 (unless they are beaten so badly a comeback is impossible)

    She is different enough to be interesting and have ideas; she’s political enough to see the need for centrism in some areas

    But she’s also a bit of a blank slate. I might be projecting. Need to see more of her to know
    Remember the £600K offer to sub-postmasters and the out-of-the- blue timing, so sudden that neither the government nor the post office could find the time to inform any of the law firms or groups acting for the sub-postmasters.

    Well it turns out it had to be rushed out that day so that when Kemi had her first appearance before the Business Select Committee she had something to say on the topic. Even then she delegated most of the detailed answers to one of her officials.

    That is why Kevin Hollinrake - when making his statement in the Commons - had no answers to many important questions.

    PR and saving face - that's all that mattered. Not good enough, Kemi.

    https://x.com/stugoo17/status/1708704450246758578?s=61&t=wWWeJB3W_ksMJK4LA1OvkA
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    My vote share prediction at the mo is something like:

    43% Lab
    31% Con
    11% LD
    15% Others

    This’d translate to I guess about a 60 or 70 seat majority to Labour (drop that to 40 or 50 if they don’t crack Scotland); the number of Con seats I think will be defined considerably by the efficiency of LD votes.
  • boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    Which was not a good reason to do it.

    Other countries are thousands of kilometres long.

    England, especially just London to Manchester, is not. Its less 200 miles via the M1 and M6.

    Keeping up with the Joneses is not a good reason to do anything, we need to do what's right for our country, and theoretically if it could be done at half the price if it was 300km instead of 400km then that would be the right decision.

    But realistically the biggest cost is all the chopping and changing and lack of certainty. There should have been one set of specifications agreed, then it should have been built, no ifs, no buts and no equivocations.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 62,631
    edited October 2023
    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,139
    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
    It is, indeed. But evidently a cost benefit analysis did show it was worth it - and remember, it's a line being built to run not for five years, but for many, many decades.
  • AlanbrookeAlanbrooke Posts: 25,302
    EU as much fun as ever

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/03/french-german-ministers-boat-trip-drinking-repair-relations/

    The French sense that, unlike Angela Merkel, Chancellor Scholz cares little for their language and culture and has a “liberal” penchant that makes it hard to find common ground.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993

    Cyclefree said:

    Chris said:

    With the Cons seemingly gone full Ukip where does that now leave the coming election? I've long been of the mind of a smaller Lab majority, something like 25-50. But the increasing irrelevance of what the current government is saying to punters could well swell the likely opposition vote in an election. Could a strong Lab performance and a resurgent LibDem vote, in such circumstances herald a much stronger majority via a pincer movement (or perhaps pincher is more appropriate)...

    For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to capture the centre ground of British politics. It's a mystery to me why a policy of lurching to the right should result in any net benefit at all. Even if it had a net benefit for the total Tory vote share, without a shadow of a doubt it would increase tactical voting against the Tories.

    The other consequence is that the starting point for the Tories after the election would be somewhere much closer to the lunatic fringe, and the party would be ripe to shift even further away from sanity. After Labour's shift to the left in the early 1980s, the Tories were in power for another decade and a half. I'm wondering whether the Tories will ever recover from the legacy of Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak.
    There is IMO a serious risk that they come close to being wiped out - below 100 seats.
    I doubt that. The Conservative Party is akin to a cockroach. It can survive nuclear Armageddon. A quarter of the population will vote for the name alone irrespective of how right wing populist the march forward becomes. That is a shame. Obliteration followed by a phoenix from the ashes. "one nation" party that swifty establishes itself as fit for government would be optimal.

    As that won't happen we can only hope that Mordaunt, Tugenhadt or Cleverly become leader and isolate the nutjobs. Should Labour fail we are left with the serious prospect of a landslide PM Braverman, Badenoch, Truss or Patel which doesn't bear thinking about. Never forget, the venal Johnson created this monster for self-aggrandisement purposes and didn't consider the consequences.

    Demographics alone argue against any future Tory landslide if they go even further to the extreme. They have so alienated so much of the working age population that if Labour does win a majority at the next GE, they’ll have to mess up spectacularly not to win another term should the Tories end up with Braverman, Truss or Patel as leader. Badenoch may be another matter as she does seem to have a degree of pragmatism about her.

    It only needs one black swan event and anyone and everyone could be looking to the Labour alternative.

    I do agree about Badenoch. She has the look of a helpful and knowledgeable librarian so she can't be so bad can she? I am hoping she's a Trojan horse and it's all for show and once in post she reverts to an Angela Rayner or a younger Diane Abbott character
  • eek said:

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    So while stood in the old Central Station in Manchester (which used to have direct Trains to London before Beeching) Sunak is going to announce HS2 to Manchester is cancelled.

    How tone deaf and stupid is he?
    Let them travel by copter.
  • eek said:

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    So while stood in the old Central Station in Manchester (which used to have direct Trains to London before Beeching) Sunak is going to announce HS2 to Manchester is cancelled.

    How tone deaf and stupid is he?
    And then he'll fly back to London.
  • Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
    It's not worth building a high speed line to Birmingham, it's not far enough. It should always have been planned to go to Glasgow.

    I can't help thinking the "cost overrun" is a feature, not a bug, and designed to provide grift for Tory donors.

    It's about time we got back to the central tenet of capitalism, profit is the reward for capitalism and if you fuck up, you lose your shirt.
    Not only is it not far enough, its also Birmingham.....
  • eek said:

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    So while stood in the old Central Station in Manchester (which used to have direct Trains to London before Beeching) Sunak is going to announce HS2 to Manchester is cancelled.

    How tone deaf and stupid is he?
    Just a caveat on that as it is Sky who are speculating and it has not been confirmed
  • eekeek Posts: 27,939

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    Which was not a good reason to do it.

    Other countries are thousands of kilometres long.

    England, especially just London to Manchester, is not. Its less 200 miles via the M1 and M6.

    Keeping up with the Joneses is not a good reason to do anything, we need to do what's right for our country, and theoretically if it could be done at half the price if it was 300km instead of 400km then that would be the right decision.

    But realistically the biggest cost is all the chopping and changing and lack of certainty. There should have been one set of specifications agreed, then it should have been built, no ifs, no buts and no equivocations.
    The irony is there are enough stops that even 300kph is the best you could sanely agree.

    The money would have been best spent in building appropriate through tunnels through Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds so that NPR became easy. Heck it could have been built as a loop, London - Birmingham - Manchester - Leeds - Sheffield - Derby - Birmingham - London..
  • Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
    It's not worth building a high speed line to Birmingham, it's not far enough. It should always have been planned to go to Glasgow.

    I can't help thinking the "cost overrun" is a feature, not a bug, and designed to provide grift for Tory donors.

    It's about time we got back to the central tenet of capitalism, profit is the reward for capitalism and if you fuck up, you lose your shirt.
    Absolutely.

    And boy have these MPs fucked up.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    What should the conservatives have done about the media cycle?

    The issue arose, and we would likely not be hearing about it for the last few weeks, because, as the BBC political editor said this morning, a photographer snapped some idiot going into Downing Street with a visible doc on talks between Hunt and Sunak re HS2.

    Do you think the Tories should have rushed a decision in order to close down the media cycle or do you think it’s better in the long run that a decision is made (rightly or wrongly) based on talks, evidence and plans rather than “shit, the media know we are discussing it we better close it down asap with a rushed decision”?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 27,993
    edited October 2023

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    My main problem with cancelling HS2 is this. It's a bit like ordering a Range Rover for £100,000, paying 30% up front, changing your mind and forgoing the deposit. It doesn't make financial sense.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    eek said:

    Good morning

    Sky saying the HS2 decision is expected to be announced by Sunak in his speech tomorrow after a cabinet meeting later today

    I cannot understand how on earth the conservatives have allowed this to dominate the media cycle other than abject communication incompetence

    I have mixed feelings on HS2 and need to hear the explanation and alternative investments for the North but they couldn’t have handed a better gift to Labour for their conference next week

    So while stood in the old Central Station in Manchester (which used to have direct Trains to London before Beeching) Sunak is going to announce HS2 to Manchester is cancelled.

    How tone deaf and stupid is he?
    QTWTAI self-evident.

    Looking forward to a good insider book on this. One of my fave political books of recent years was Rawnsley’s The End Of The Party.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,216
    edited October 2023

    Nigelb said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    Did y’all hear the recent episode of More or Less, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ggvbxq (it’s at the end of the episode), on HS2 and big infrastructure problems being expensive in the UK. They talked to a researcher who’s done an international comparison and concluded that big infrastructure projects all around the world often have overspends but that UK projects are no worse on average. We’re not exceptionally bad at these things.

    However, HS2 is a mess and massively over-budget, which the interviewee put down to plans being repeatedly changed after work had started. He said that’s the main cause of extra expense.

    The more or less episode was enlightening - funnily enough this morning R4 had a spokesman for a big building company who obviously hadn’t listened to MoL and was spouting crap about how none of this happened in any other country.

    More interesting was the interview with the chap who ran HS1 and was head of Crossrail (Rob Bowman I think?) who made a few very interesting points, namely:

    HS1 was designed and built for the French high speed rail tech and so all the kit and engineering was “out of the box” so cost a huge amount less.

    With HS1 they did not divulge the overall budget, only a handful of people knew the ceiling and so when bids went in people didn’t go crazy having seen the billions on offer. He compared it to Crossrail where the budget was announced and similar jobs from HS1 were suddenly multiples more expensive.

    He explained that for some reason HS2 was planned as a 400KPH line rather than 340KPH (I think he said) which was the European standard and so everything then becomes grossly more expensive because engineering had to be developed to accommodate the extra speed and huge costly measures had to be added to mitigate the extra noise issues this would cause.

    From here and all the media it seems there are a million different views, cancel or continue, change this bit or that hit, it’s vital, it’s not. If there is no way near a consensus then surely the best thing is to pause, rework it in a sensible way that makes it more useful, acceptable and affordable. There is no point continuing to pour money into a mistake I would have thought. See what can be cut if they lower the speed requirement, see what has been done already and where it can be used as it is until a sensible plan is ready.

    The cynic in me wonders if the custom spec for HS2 was a reaction to HS1 - got to get those costs up somehow.

    Some years back, I met a very angry sales guy from BAe. The F35 program hadn’t been customised (enough) to “unique British requirements”. So if a weapon is qualified to fit one F35B, it will be included in the next software update for all F35B - internationally. Worse, the US Marine Corps squadrons operating off the U.K. carriers would include instructors in their weapons - so U.K. pilots could end up trained on such weapons.

    All this added up, in the opinion of the sales guy to a disaster - his area was selling integration and training for weapons being bought for U.K. military aircraft.
    I would guess the spec for HS2 was that politician says “I want the best fast train service in the world so I can say we have a world leading rail service” and then a load of people google “fastest trains” and find that 400KPH is at least faster than all the European ones so they start there instead of saying “we need to free up capacity on existing lines and have a faster service, how do we best get that, is speed or capacity the priority, how can we build it with existing kit and which are the priority routes.”

    There just seems to be a lack of any thought that you can save shitloads of money adapting off the shelf kit (see the military too) but also this obsession with wanting a “world beating” something and then working towards that rather than simply saying “what do we really need without perfect being the enemy of good” and then working towards that.
    IIRC the reason for 400km/h provision was that, although current trains are slower, many countries are looking at 400km/h. Given the fifteen or so years it would take to build HS2, by the time it was opened, other countries would have 400km/h lines and trains.
    So what ?
    Given the distances involved, any cost benefit analysis would have shown it wasn't worth it.

    And as you regularly remind us, it was in any event about capacity, not speed.
    It is, indeed. But evidently a cost benefit analysis did show it was worth it - and remember, it's a line being built to run not for five years, but for many, many decades.
    But that analysis was done after the spec had been chosen.
    What was the comparative one for a 300kph track ? Massively better, I would guess.

    Also I'd guess it was never done.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    IanB2 said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    148grss said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I’ve been reading about the New York fraud court case against Trump. It seems to me that it is wrong, and, worse than that, it is a mistake

    It screams “political persecution” - as it is brought and led by a highly political controversial Democrat lawyer in NYC. It feeds into Trump’s martyr narrative (“they’re out to get me AND you”). It gives him a pulpit to address the nation daily

    It’s gonna aid him. They should have stuck with the J6 trials elsewhere etc. This new case is a grave error which makes a Trump victory more likely

    Of course you think this, you’re basically a Trumpite yourself these days.
    *weary sigh*

    No, I don’t want Trump to win. My ideal would be for both Trump and Biden to disappear from the world of politics. They are both old, selfish men past their time

    Personally I’d like a good tough Republican President who will stick to America’s allies - like the UK, Ukraine, and NATO in general. Trump won’t do that. I want him gone

    But he needs to be defeated democratically. For that the Dems should kick out Biden and get a better candidate (as the GOP seem determined to nominate Trump)

    Is that clear enough?
    But you're shimmying round the killer question with the elegance of a Strictly contestant. Whether that's Bill Bailey or Richard Coles, I don't know.

    Trump-Biden is a dismal choice. But it looks very likely to be the choice. So, taking it as read that AN Other would be preferable, on both sides, who do you go for?

    You can vote against one of them. Who do you want to fire your one bullet at?
    Trump
    However this is a much tougher question for me than it is for most PB-ers. I believe the Democrats and their Wokeness (which they export to us, in hideous forms) are a long term threat to western security and prosperity. It is that bad

    However Trump is the SHORT term threat to western security, and if your choice is to shoot one of two dangerous Bully XL dogs then you shoot the one that’s closest to biting your head off. In this case, that’s Trump
    Wokeness is a bigger threat to "western security" than Trumpism? How? I still haven't heard a decent definition of wokeness that isn't just "everything right wingers hate" (unless we mean the actual historic use of the term by the African American community).
    The end of Free Speech, the reversal of the Enlightenment, the re-racialisation and further division of society, the warping of education to meet Woke goals, the crippling of science for similar reasons, the indoctrination of our kids with mad woke bollocks, the crimping of industry with mad woke “targets”, the deligitimising of western values, history, prestige and pride, and in the end the total annihilation of a woke-weakened west

    Let’s start there
    So this Gish gallop of conclusions is missing how "wokeness" leads to these thing, and also automatically assumes all of these things are universally agreed as of value. Can you explain the causal link between what you understand as wokeness and, say, the "reversal of the Enlightenment"? Or "the warping of education to meet Woke goals"? Does Free Speech include the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre, hate speech, libel? It would be useful to know the detail of this journey rather than just the image of a right wing fever dream to understand how "wokeness" achieves all these revolutionary changes.
    Attempting to engage Leon with logic won't get you anywhere.
    I really want to know, though. In my mind "woke" seems to have just replaced "PC gone mad", and I don't see how that is the "End of the West". I would like to understand the A to B to C journey for that; even if it is mad. Because I don't see how christofascist science deniers can be the inheritors of "the Enlightenment" nor "the crippling of science".
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 8,030
    ydoethur said:

    SNP rebels in talks with Tories to bring down Greens’ coalition, Douglas Ross reveals
    Scottish Conservatives leader says he’s opened secret talks with nationalist MSPs unhappy with Scotland Government’s direction of travel

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/03/douglas-ross-snp-kate-forbes-greens-coalition-conservatives/ (£££)

    Well, they’re hardly bloody secret then are they?
    It just means there is a greater return from political mischief making than from the probability adjusted chance of bringing down the Scottish government
This discussion has been closed.