By wins for LAB in the byelections – politicalbetting.com

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

Chameleon said:

HYUFD said:

Chameleon said:

What an extremely funny set of results, nothing less than they deserve.

Wonder if this will break the collective delusion that they're fighting to win the next election not just trying to minimise the scale of the defeat (see their 80/20 strategy).

It's also striking that just from 2019 my early/mid 20s, pretty middle-class+ social circle has gone from about 50% conservative to absolute zero. If Starmer capitalises on housebuilding and infrastructure it's going to be a very long path back.

Depends on the economy what happens with inflation and growth and strikes under a Starmer government

Can't be any worse than the high inflation, low growth, record immigration, rocketing taxes and constant strikes of a Tory government eh.

Besides it's a free spin for me - I am skilled enough to get permanent residency in Australia or Canada at short notice, and a good number of my friends are also planning to emigrate there there!

HYUFD said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Beibheirli_C said:

HYUFD said:

rottenborough said:

Christopher Hope📝
@christopherhope
·
35m
👀
Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.

Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.

Yes it - playing your silly games and knifing each other in public (again!) will bury your party even deeper. So go for it

HYUFD said:

Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will

I see. Bribe them hard enough and it might offset the effects of knifing each other? It's a plan I suppose... voter neutral perhaps?

The trouble is that HYUFD and much of the Tory party think the electorate are like children and they treat them accodingly.

Even those of us who are in favour of a low tax, small state economy know that there are times when the country is in such a lot of shit that that just won't work. Although people scorn teh Thatcherite household budget analogy, that is how a lot of people think and they instinctively recoil from the idea that you can have massive amounts of debt and costs and just cut taxes.

If you want to cut taxes then first cut costs. People understand that and wil repsond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.

Except he has, as the deficit is falling
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/21/uk-budget-deficit-tax-cuts-jeremy-hunt-inflation

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

HYUFD said:

RochdalePioneers said:

HYUFD said:

RochdalePioneers said:

HYUFD said:

rottenborough said:

Christopher Hope📝
@christopherhope
·
35m
👀
Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.

Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.

Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will

You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife

You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.

If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway

Tory voters are affected by the collapse in public services and local government. It is YOUR voters demanding these things as well.

No Tory voters do not want higher tax and higher spend, they want a choice not an echo

RochdalePioneers said:

DougSeal said:

Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.

Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?

That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.

When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.

But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.

So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.

Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

RochdalePioneers said:

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

It wasn't designed to run at 400kph. It was designed to run at 320kph, with overspeed capabilities to 360kph on straighter sections. 400kph was only ever passive provision, not an actual design specification.

Wulfrun_Phil said:

RochdalePioneers said:

DougSeal said:

Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.

Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?

That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.

When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.

But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.

So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.

Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.

Well given that the economic policy that any Truss redux would pursue can be guaranteed to be (once again) deranged, your analogy with Henry VI in 1470-71 would be very apt.

viewcode said:

Stuartinromford said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).

This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either.
I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.

What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.

In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.

Indeed. things have really changed. The social assumptions underpinning the UK between 1945 and (say) 2015 are disappearing before our eyes. The belief in Britain as a communal experience underpinned by shared institutions has gone and it makes me sad.

Wulfrun_Phil said:

RochdalePioneers said:

DougSeal said:

Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.

Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?

That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.

When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.

But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.

So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.

Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.

Well given that the economic policy that any Truss redux would pursue can be guaranteed to be (once again) deranged, your analogy with Henry VI in 1470-71 would be very apt.

PS. Or maybe Truss is auditioning for the part of Margaret of Anjou?

RochdalePioneers said:

Greg Hands getting demolished by Nick Tory Ferrari on LBC. Trying to claim that both byelections were fine as the Labour vote went down.

RochdalePioneers said:

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

It wasn't designed to run at 400kph. It was designed to run at 320kph, with overspeed capabilities to 360kph on straighter sections. 400kph was only ever passive provision, not an actual design specification.

ydoethur said:

numbertwelve said:

Heathener said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

ydoethur said:

Pulpstar said:

By election results not dissimilar to 92-97 tbh.

In some ways you would also compare them to 87-92, although there (for example in Richmond) the splits worked in the Tories’ favour.

But you could also compare them to 2005-10. We know how that played out.

I’ve always been sceptical about Starmer winning an overall majority because of the enormous number of seats he needs to gain. Swings like this mean it’s plausible. However, I still wouldn’t be betting on a majority of over 30.

however much Heathener wishcasts, but it's definitely within the realms of possibility.

I don't think it is wishcasting. I'm going on the current facts. I bet regardless of preference, often making money on Republicans and Conservatives. And I did well financially from the Brexit vote.

We need to look at the present facts especially the opinion polls. They're not wrong. More anecdotally I've not heard such anger against a prevailing party since 1997, and it's even more pronounced this time because the economic climate is so much worse (it was good in '97).

I think the difference in 1997 was people were fed up with Tory priorities rather than management per se (though the sleaze and black Wednesday did come into it somewhat).

This time people are fed up of both. Just thoroughly fed up with the party and its myriad failings. I think more so than 1997.

But again - Starmer is no Blair and he starts from a lot further back.

kinabalu said:

So, game over really. The unenthusiastic 'nothing like 1997 apart from the result' Labour landslide is coming.

Phil said:

RochdalePioneers said:

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

It wasn't designed to run at 400kph. It was designed to run at 320kph, with overspeed capabilities to 360kph on straighter sections. 400kph was only ever passive provision, not an actual design specification.

This doesn’t actually counter my point does it?

We could have built a normal, max current UK grade 220km/hr line & captured the overwhelming majority of the economic benefits of HS2.

Jonathan said:

When people compare the 90s to today they are looking in the wrong place.

The should be comparing Starmer to John Smith rather than Blair.

Also, by far the biggest gap is in the Tories.

John Major’s team are far superior to Sunaks team. Clarke is far stronger than Hunt. Majors immediate predecessor is far stronger than Truss. The government record to defend is far, far weaker.

Above all I continue to be astonished at Sunaks lack of political touch. Spectacularly bad. The public have not warmed to him. Again unlike major.

williamglenn said:

kinabalu said:

So, game over really. The unenthusiastic 'nothing like 1997 apart from the result' Labour landslide is coming.

And Starmer will probably do it with fewer votes than Johson won in 2019.

Theuniondivvie said:

viewcode said:

Stuartinromford said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).

This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either.
I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.

What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.

In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.

Indeed. things have really changed. The social assumptions underpinning the UK between 1945 and (say) 2015 are disappearing before our eyes. The belief in Britain as a communal experience underpinned by shared institutions has gone and it makes me sad.

How ironic that an underpinning of Brexit was a retreat into Britishness. Admittedly it was Faragian, UJ shoes Britishness which contains the huge, bulging seeds of its own failure.

Phil said:

Nigelb said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

Even if misconceived, the manner of the north of Birmingham cancellation was even more so.

Oh, absolutely: that was Sunakian / Treasury Brain vandalism of the worst sort. When you’ve spent the majority of the £ on a train line already, to cancel it in a way that guarantees you will never see any economic return is the worst kind of penny pinching.

They could at least have built it out to Crewe so that it would join up with the other mainlines, but no, even that was too much for the hogoblins of the Treasury.

Carnyx said:

Mm, my 504 majority guess for Labour in Mid Beds wasn't bad, based solely on an old aeroplane.

Anyone do better?

Carnyx said:

Mm, my 504 majority guess for Labour in Mid Beds wasn't bad, based solely on an old aeroplane.

Anyone do better?

Phil said:

RochdalePioneers said:

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

It wasn't designed to run at 400kph. It was designed to run at 320kph, with overspeed capabilities to 360kph on straighter sections. 400kph was only ever passive provision, not an actual design specification.

This doesn’t actually counter my point does it?

We could have built a normal, max current UK grade 220km/hr line & captured the overwhelming majority of the economic benefits of HS2.

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Good morning

Can I congratulate Labour on their overnight wins which I did predict

There are those in the conservative party who should hang their heads in shame beginning with Nadine Dorries and her hero Johnson, but also Truss and the ERG

I am no longer a member and expect it to go into opposition, at which point it has a choice of turning right towards the dreadful Farage, JRM, Braverman grouping or regaining it's sanity and moving back to the one nation conservative I can vote for, though right now I am grateful just to live a day at a time after the week I have just had

I would also say that of course Starmer is fit to be PM and whilst I am not a fan, to suggest otherwise is just politics

RochdalePioneers said:

Carnyx said:

Mm, my 504 majority guess for Labour in Mid Beds wasn't bad, based solely on an old aeroplane.

Anyone do better?

The people of Tamworth. Who ended up with an MP who didn't tell loads of them to FUCK OFF. Bravo!

You do have to ask how on earth did the Tories manage to select *that* as their candidate. Vetting?

Stark_Dawning said:

Can someone help? Here's a question I've been pondering of late. King Charles III got the III bit because, obviously, there were two kings called Charles before him. But who or what gets to decide who officially counts as a historical monarch or not? For example, it's surely debatable whether Edward V should count as a genuine king, but it's been decided that he was, and there must be other borderline cases throughout history. So what's the official criteria?

JosiasJessop said:

theProle said:

eek said:

RochdalePioneers said:

Phil said:

MattW said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?

I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.

That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.

All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.

To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.

Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.

The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.

It wasn't designed to run at 400kph. It was designed to run at 320kph, with overspeed capabilities to 360kph on straighter sections. 400kph was only ever passive provision, not an actual design specification.

What I loved was the idea that HS2 could follow the M40 - love to know how it would do through High Wycombe - which was the reason why the route round there goes through Amersham / Missenden...

Wasn't the sane and affordable option to go up the M11 corridor, rather than the M40, the a junction near Cambridge? It made a link with HS1 viable, get's you out of the expensive bit through the Chiltens, and you'd end up with routes something like London-Cambridge-Corby-Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds and London-Cambridge-Coventry-Stoke-Manchester?

Except Cambridge is nowhere near Birmingham, which was the stretch of line with the biggest capacity crunch.

And from Cambridge, where next? You're pretty far east and away from the massive cities (which was why the ECML, which is further west from Cambridge, never did as well as the WCML). Whereas from Birmingham you have the large northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds within relatively straightforward reach.

kinabalu said:

So, game over really. The unenthusiastic 'nothing like 1997 apart from the result' Labour landslide is coming.

Clutch_Brompton said:

Someone may have posted this. PoliticsJoe with a musical comment on the mood this morning. Some PB diehards may like to look away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9-0WGo9Zrk

Chameleon said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

Shouldn't have been an either/or! If the UK properly cracked down on the benefit scrounging pensioners (if you want to be voluntarily unemployed fine, but the state shouldn't pay for it) and put the state pension back to 19/20 levels we'd be able to build a new Crossrail every year with the savings.

Just shows where the Tories have gone wrong this parliament - prioritised benefits for the bone idle boomers over capital spending.

Andy_JS said:

It's time for a leadership challenge, with Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch being the main candidates.

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

bondegezou said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Heathener said:

Foxy said:

So it appears that Selby was the byelection to notice, not Uxbridge. Both results clearly in line with Selby.

Yep. I do still fear outer London may be Labour's GE Achilles heel. Saddiq Khan has damaged Labour.

Cameron was right that the country is not Twitter, not that the media notices.

That can be extended though, the country is not London either, not that the media notices.

If you want to run a country that suits the North, or anywhere outside London, it takes more than taking a picture of you pretending to fill up a tank of petrol. It takes more than saying you are on the side of motorists, while increasing taxes on the cars of the future and failing to invest in roads, charging networks, or any other general infrastructure.

Yes, the reason the Conservatives lost Tamworth was because of a lack of investment in roads. It was not because of the cost of living, decay of the NHS, Partygate, Chris Pincher’s behaviour and Peter Bone’s behaviour, Brexit, delays in the court system, cuts in local government services, Liz Truss, the mishandling of the pandemic, failures on immigration, higher taxes, and flip-flopping on HS2.

Well done for completely missing the point.

It's interesting that you see those as alternatives, rather than a failure to invest in the roads being one of the multiple other failures as well.

Especially since you incorporated HS2 in your second list and as we've established that affects far fewer voters.

A failure to invest in roads, or charging infrastructure, while jacking up taxes, is just another in the litany of failures to add to your list. If you can get over your pathological hatred of investing in transportation.

Where have I shown a pathological hatred of investing in transportation? I am for investing in transportation. Bring on more charging points!

I am making fun of your personal obsession, and your belief that doing something about your personal obsession will fix everything else. You want to be a politician: you are convinced that your policies are right, you’d fit right in. This website is about political betting, which requires an understanding of psephology. Whether or not we need more investment in roads, that’s not why the Tories lost 2 by-elections.

It is not a personal obsession and I don't remotely think that doing something about it will fix everything else. I never once suggested otherwise.

Indeed I've repeatedly said it's not either or, it's multiple things.

Our long neglected roads that haven't kept pace with population growth, and our lack of charging infrastructure is just one of the many things that need fixing in this country.

Other capex infrastructure investment that hasn't kept up with population growth needs addressing too.

Richard_Tyndall said:

Chameleon said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

Shouldn't have been an either/or! If the UK properly cracked down on the benefit scrounging pensioners (if you want to be voluntarily unemployed fine, but the state shouldn't pay for it) and put the state pension back to 19/20 levels we'd be able to build a new Crossrail every year with the savings.

Just shows where the Tories have gone wrong this parliament - prioritised benefits for the bone idle boomers over capital spending.

Even if it wasn't an either/or it was/is still an unecessary white elephant finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems.

Roger said:

noneoftheabove said:

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

Here I disagree. Politics is turbo charged, memories are short and patience with governments low.

You tell that to brands that have lost their position in the market never to recover. Ratners would hardly get a mention. Major brands that screwed up. All you remember of them is a long forgotten name and maybe an old tube in your bathroom or a bottle on a shelf or an intro to a film or an engine part in a garage or an old cheque book

Cookie said:

Theuniondivvie said:

viewcode said:

Stuartinromford said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).

This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either.
I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.

What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.

In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.

Indeed. things have really changed. The social assumptions underpinning the UK between 1945 and (say) 2015 are disappearing before our eyes. The belief in Britain as a communal experience underpinned by shared institutions has gone and it makes me sad.

How ironic that an underpinning of Brexit was a retreat into Britishness. Admittedly it was Faragian, UJ shoes Britishness which contains the huge, bulging seeds of its own failure.

But I don't think it's any different for France, or Germany, or Spain, or the USA. It's driven by technology.
Indeed, this website is a prime example. 30 years ago none of us would have been online discussing politics and other matters with like minded people; we'd have been interacting with the people real life gave us. Our cultural consumption would have been much more mainstream, because the niches wouldn't have existed. Our kids would have watched Blue Peter because they wouldn't have had any choice of entertainment (personally, I don't think I've watched more than two BP episodes in my life - never really to my tastes - but still). I don't think this is any different in the UK to anywhere else.

david_herdson said:

Roger said:

noneoftheabove said:

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

Here I disagree. Politics is turbo charged, memories are short and patience with governments low.

You tell that to brands that have lost their position in the market never to recover. Ratners would hardly get a mention. Major brands that screwed up. All you remember of them is a long forgotten name and maybe an old tube in your bathroom or a bottle on a shelf or an intro to a film or an engine part in a garage or an old cheque book

Other brands could replace those long-forgotten ones that were taken over, went bust or rebranded.

Politics is different: as long as there is no right-of-centre alternative that could replace the Tories, they will survive and eventually return - though I'd expect Labour to win *at least* two terms first.

HYUFD said:

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

52% of voters voted for Brexit despite the Tory leader at the time opposing it, indeed Brexit voters leaking to Reform and even Labour having voted for Boris is making the Tory situation worse.

How a Labour government handles the economy will be far more significant for the future Tory prospects than Brexit

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Cookie said:

Theuniondivvie said:

viewcode said:

Stuartinromford said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).

This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either.
I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.

What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.

In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.

Indeed. things have really changed. The social assumptions underpinning the UK between 1945 and (say) 2015 are disappearing before our eyes. The belief in Britain as a communal experience underpinned by shared institutions has gone and it makes me sad.

How ironic that an underpinning of Brexit was a retreat into Britishness. Admittedly it was Faragian, UJ shoes Britishness which contains the huge, bulging seeds of its own failure.

But I don't think it's any different for France, or Germany, or Spain, or the USA. It's driven by technology.
Indeed, this website is a prime example. 30 years ago none of us would have been online discussing politics and other matters with like minded people; we'd have been interacting with the people real life gave us. Our cultural consumption would have been much more mainstream, because the niches wouldn't have existed. Our kids would have watched Blue Peter because they wouldn't have had any choice of entertainment (personally, I don't think I've watched more than two BP episodes in my life - never really to my tastes - but still). I don't think this is any different in the UK to anywhere else.

Thirty years ago, kids were watching Teletubbies before graduating to Blue Peter but the crucial point you and others have made is that both were on mainstream BBC television.

viewcode said:

LostPassword said:

turbotubbs said:

Heathener said:

"Armageddon is coming for the Conservatives"

George Osborne, former Chancellor.

I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts.
If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?

I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.

Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?

Help To Buy did. It was wrong from day 1. All it did was increase the price of houses and the amount of debt. It was stupid and everybody loved it. If you look at the house price curve you'll see that after about four years of static house prices HTB sent them back up again. A genuinely stupid policy.

MarqueeMark said:

Roger said:

HYUFD said:

Roger said:

The big question is how many generations before the electorate forgive the Tories for taking us down the rabbit hole of Brexit? I suspect a long time. Though Brexit wasn't mentioned as an issue it's effects in many ways has destabilised the electorate and subliminally made us see our position in the world differently

52% of voters voted for Brexit despite the Tory leader at the time opposing it, indeed Brexit voters leaking to Reform and even Labour having voted for Boris is making the Tory situation worse.

How a Labour government handles the economy will be far more significant for the future Tory prospects than Brexit

Brexit is a stench that wont go away. Every time Rishi goes abroad he seems to get smaller. Do you think he's actually shrinking or that the country he represents is?

I waited in the longest airport queue I can remember being in at an airport a couple of weeks ago. Do you think everyone in the queue wasn't joining the dots and asking what caused this new phenomena?

That people voted for it is irrelevant. Do you think human nature allows them to blame themselves?

Alternatively, Remaoners are a stench on the nostrils of democracy that won't go away....

rottenborough said:

"The Tory party will instead turn to one of the candidates who isn’t really good enough."

https://lookstranger.substack.com/p/a-perpetual-vortex?r=8dmga&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

JosiasJessop said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Chameleon said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Phil said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

eek said:

stodge said:

El_Capitano said:

It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.

And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?

I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.

It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.

The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?

Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...

One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.

Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years

That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.

It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.

The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.

A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.

The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.

HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.

We must do something
This is something
We must do it.

Shouldn't have been an either/or! If the UK properly cracked down on the benefit scrounging pensioners (if you want to be voluntarily unemployed fine, but the state shouldn't pay for it) and put the state pension back to 19/20 levels we'd be able to build a new Crossrail every year with the savings.

Just shows where the Tories have gone wrong this parliament - prioritised benefits for the bone idle boomers over capital spending.

Even if it wasn't an either/or it was/is still an unecessary white elephant finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems.

"finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems"

LOL. You keep on saying that, and it gives me a good laugh. Thanks.

If high-speed rail is "finding yesterday's solutions for the last century's problems", then why are most major economies in the world (aside from the USA) investing heavily in it? What do you know that they don't?

The pandemic hurt railway usage; but the rebound has been quite staggering. And working from home or telecommuting has not hurt it as much as I feared either. AIUI, long-distance travel is actually up since the end of the pandemic.