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.
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.
Oh I've answered that - as does the video I linked to earlier - our costs are high because everything is a 1 off project that needs to be kicked off from the first principles where that first principal may be finding a set of people willing to start reading Electrification for beginners 101 because the previous project was 10 years ago so all the expertise has gone abroad.
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!
They also have problems with rising inflation and housing costs and in Australia you can now add the row over the Voice
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
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.
This is the first time the RefUK opinion polling has been reflected in real votes; well ahead of the Greens in Brexity seats, which is what I'd expect, unlike Selby. If this is sustained then the Tories will be in deep trouble in the GE.
Ok-ish for the Lib Dems in Mid-Beds. In practice there won't be many seats where it is unclear who the challenger is at the next GE, and most of those will be such safe seats that the Tories will win anyway. The only seat I can think of where both Labour and LDs will go for it is Wimbledon, and I don't think it will matter because the Tories will come 3rd. Maybe also Colchester, with the same result.
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
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.
This is over an hour long but gets to the root of all of HS2's problems
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
It's also worth pointing out that we keep on completely messing up the BCR calculations - the Elizabeth line is already used twice as much as the upper end long term prediction. It's probably similar for things like a Leeds metro, HS2, a proper Birmingham underground, mid-size city tram systems etc.
There is a great deal of if you build it they will come - and with
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.
Oh I've answered that - as does the video I linked to earlier - our costs are high because everything is a 1 off project that needs to be kicked off from the first principles where that first principal may be finding a set of people willing to start reading Electrification for beginners 101 because the previous project was 10 years ago so all the expertise has gone abroad.
This 1000%. We don't do it. So we're not good at it. So it's expensive. So we don't do it... We need a continuous pipeline of projects, with a culture of learning applied to the cost structure, and expertise retained within public and private sectors. We could be up among the best in the world at this stuff if we put our mind to it.
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.
I don't have any issue with the speed, but we should have done what the french do - tell the NIMBYs that if they want it buried they can have that done, but thy'll have to pay for it in the form of increased local tax.
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
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.
Under Truss the Tories were polling even worse than they are now
There is freeness in opposition. Truss would never have worked in government (as proven), but in opposition, it'll make the Tories feel better about themselves until they get workable plans in order in 10 years time or so.
Braveman, Barclay or Badenoch is a more likely next Conservative leader than Truss
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
They have High Tax. They also have Low Spend. Do Tory voters not send their kids to school? Use the NHS? Walk or drive the streets?
Your lot have corruptly broken this country so that most basic services are visibly crumbling. Unless you are telling me that every Tory voter has their own private jet, they are using these services and seeing the damage. They want them fixed.
Against the prevailing tide of opinion I would observe:
1. I had expected the Lab maj in Tamworth to be bigger, given the seats electoral history. 2. Nad's conduct was so abysmal a Tory disaster was inevitable in Mid Beds. The earth had been salted.
Doesn't mean we aren't looking at 97 redux next year. But worth bearing in mind.
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?
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.
This is over an hour long but gets to the root of all of HS2's problems
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
Instead, the Tories set up a 'National Infrastructure Commission', whose recommendations they ignore.
You can define top level power in politics in UK as the arena in which you cannot transfer contested decisions to anyone else at all. To govern is to choose.
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.
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.
Oh I've answered that - as does the video I linked to earlier - our costs are high because everything is a 1 off project that needs to be kicked off from the first principles where that first principal may be finding a set of people willing to start reading Electrification for beginners 101 because the previous project was 10 years ago so all the expertise has gone abroad.
This 1000%. We don't do it. So we're not good at it. So it's expensive. So we don't do it... We need a continuous pipeline of projects, with a culture of learning applied to the cost structure, and expertise retained within public and private sectors. We could be up among the best in the world at this stuff if we put our mind to it.
We should be the best of the world at this - the fact we aren't is a legacy of Thatcher and everyone since...
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.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Interesting that you say Starmer is unfit to be PM, at no point in 2019 did you think Johnson was unfit to be PM, in a straight fight, on suitability to be PM Starmer beats Johnson hands down surely
It depends what you want a PM do be and do. Johnson is a fat lying oaf. He played politics quite neatly in 2019, the idiot remainers in the house of commons needed their heads banging together, he did that pretty effectively, and eventually got a mandate from the country as a result.
Starmer's consistent behavior in demanding ever more and harder lockdowns regardless of the facts on the ground make him the worst sort of authoritarian, and he's therefore obviously completely unsuited to office. That's far worse than playing dirty to force the hand of a house of commons in which all factions were playing dirty to try and get their preferred outcome.
I don't like Johnson, I don't want him back as prime minister - I think he's unsuitable for high office. But if I was given a binary choice, even now, I'd have to take him over someone as bad as Starmer.
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...
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 problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South"
Firstly, that is rubbish. There is a demonstrated need for more north-south capacity; there was in the late 90's early 2000's when the disastrous WCML modernisation program occurred, there was ten years later when HS2 was first proposed, and there is now.
Secondly, there is no reason why we cannot do it all: for instance EWR, NPR and HS2. Preferably as part of a joined-up, integrated network, but
There is this stupid mythical idea that as I want *my* project to go ahead, I need to destroy all competing projects. The stupidity being that in killing a project you don't like, you make it easier for others to kill *your* project. As we're already seeing, NIMBY groups are already having a go at EWR.
We need to build more infrastructure in this country. JFBI.
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.
Despite his weaknesses and failure to build HS2 or mastermind 'Eat Out To Help Out', Henry VI managed to found King's College Cambridge and Eton.
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.
I think the Tamworth result is much, much more significant than the Mid Beds result. I expect the Tories to win Mid Beds back at the GE, but maybe not Tamworth.
Since Brexit, Labour has really, really struggled in most of the Midlands; I'd go so far as to say it has been deeply unpopular outside Birmingham and one or two other cities. Tamworth is the first indication that these struggles are easing, and that Brexit has less salience - a trend that should be even stronger by the time of the GE.
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?
Was Margaret of Anjou a Fetlife dominatrix like Truss?
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Interesting that you say Starmer is unfit to be PM, at no point in 2019 did you think Johnson was unfit to be PM, in a straight fight, on suitability to be PM Starmer beats Johnson hands down surely
It depends what you want a PM do be and do. Johnson is a fat lying oaf. He played politics quite neatly in 2019, the idiot remainers in the house of commons needed their heads banging together, he did that pretty effectively, and eventually got a mandate from the country as a result.
Starmer's consistent behavior in demanding ever more and harder lockdowns regardless of the facts on the ground make him the worst sort of authoritarian, and he's therefore obviously completely unsuited to office. That's far worse than playing dirty to force the hand of a house of commons in which all factions were playing dirty to try and get their preferred outcome.
I don't like Johnson, I don't want him back as prime minister - I think he's unsuitable for high office. But if I was given a binary choice, even now, I'd have to take him over someone as bad as Starmer.
You would support Johnson? With HIS record of utter incompetence, lying and laziness?
I think you need your head examined - or at least a lie down in a nice, quiet dark room until you recover
Greg Hands getting demolished by Nick Tory Ferrari on LBC. Trying to claim that both byelections were fine as the Labour vote went down.
The Labour vote actually went up in some of the by-elections won by Tony Blair in the run up to 1997, despite the lower turnout. Wirral South, SE Staffs,
Him and the Chesham guy are textbook by-election tools.
How hard is it to warmly congratulate the winner, thank your campaign team, say, "Well, by-elections is as by-elections does to the media" and go on holiday for a few days?
Still, champagne corks popping at Eddie Hughes's house.
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.
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?
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.
It's not a rerun of 97. Politics and the state of the country are both fundamentally quite different. I understand that as a landslide win for Labour it is a point of comparison, but this will not be 'another 97' or 'another 92'. It'll be 2024.
While a lot of the change is a series of unforced errors by the Conservatives (I still can scarcely believe the stupidity of announcing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2... in Manchester, not a killer point in itself but beautifully illustrative of the state of the Tory party at the moment.), nonetheless SKS has unquestionably done a politically astute move into the centre ground and banished Corbyn's ghost. If Mid Beds can be overturned (in a three horse race, no less), anything is possible.
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.
I think the answer to that one is obvius although sad. WHatever they might say, the London-centric politicians simply don't care about the North and don't want to waste money on it. That applied to Labour for years because they thought the North would vote for them anyway and to the Tories because they knew the North would never vote for them. (The Brexit effect being the exception).
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.
We could have done, but there's something about high speed rail being built across the world, even in countries far poorer than ourselves, and then us saying "we can't afford it".
Remember that it isn't the speed that is the reason for the failure of the project. The DfT and Treasury have both endlessly fiddled with the specs - which adds huge cost - and have demanded that the infrastructure be able to withstand the breakup of the earth at the contractor's risk - which adds huge cost.
We could have built a 360kph railway for a fraction of the cost. But we didn't because we're worse than the Belgians and the Spanish and the Italians.
Mr. M, is there a Russian election or milestone calendar event soon? A desire for a positive story ahead of a vote or suchlike could be the 'justification' for hurling many troops into a meatgrinder.
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.
Agree with all of this. We have the absolute dregs here. I suspect the rot runs through into the spads and the CCHQ machine too.
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.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 28m Having outlasted Liz Truss, the lettuce and the Earl of Bute, Rishi Sunak is 4 days away from overtaking Alec Douglas-Home
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.
It's not a rerun of 97. Politics and the state of the country are both fundamentally quite different. I understand that as a landslide win for Labour it is a point of comparison, but this will not be 'another 97' or 'another 92'. It'll be 2024.
While a lot of the change is a series of unforced errors by the Conservatives (I still can scarcely believe the stupidity of announcing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2... in Manchester, not a killer point in itself but beautifully illustrative of the state of the Tory party at the moment.), nonetheless SKS has unquestionably done a politically astute move into the centre ground and banished Corbyn's ghost. If Mid Beds can be overturned (in a three horse race, no less), anything is possible.
I don't know if this has been surmised elsewhere, but maybe the third horse drew enough votes from the first horse to let the second horse squeak though? The LibDem intervention could have been helpful to Labour's victory. And would it be rude to suggest that somewhere in deepest central Bedfordshire there remains a core of socially-conservative, semi-rural voters who aren't quite yet ready for an MP called Festus?
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.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Interesting that you say Starmer is unfit to be PM, at no point in 2019 did you think Johnson was unfit to be PM, in a straight fight, on suitability to be PM Starmer beats Johnson hands down surely
It depends what you want a PM do be and do. Johnson is a fat lying oaf. He played politics quite neatly in 2019, the idiot remainers in the house of commons needed their heads banging together, he did that pretty effectively, and eventually got a mandate from the country as a result.
Starmer's consistent behavior in demanding ever more and harder lockdowns regardless of the facts on the ground make him the worst sort of authoritarian, and he's therefore obviously completely unsuited to office. That's far worse than playing dirty to force the hand of a house of commons in which all factions were playing dirty to try and get their preferred outcome.
I don't like Johnson, I don't want him back as prime minister - I think he's unsuitable for high office. But if I was given a binary choice, even now, I'd have to take him over someone as bad as Starmer.
You would support Johnson? With HIS record of utter incompetence, lying and laziness?
I think you need your head examined - or at least a lie down in a nice, quiet dark room until you recover
Incompetent bluster beats competent evil. Starmer will do more damage in the next 5 years than the Tories have managed in 13. Covid showed us exactly what Starmer is like inside, and it's not pretty - I can't believe more people don't see it.
I'm not saying I like the current Tory party. I don't - it's a ship of fools, and some quite unpleasant ones at that. I'm currently not even willing to vote for them. But Starmer will be even worse.
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.
It seems as if Ernest Marples’ descendants have infiltrated the Treasury.
Does all this mean we'll never be hearing from Nadine Dorries again?
Who?
The chances of her not writing another book, possibly about the travails and injustices to which she has been subject, and at great length, are nil. The media will do their job of picking out the interesting sentence or two so that we don't have to.
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.
It seems as if Ernest Marples’ descendants have infiltrated the Treasury.
And PB, too, let's not forget. One does wonder if they all have shares in concrete and construction firms.*
Mind, cancelling HS2 just when they have almost finished building it would be the optimal solution for them. So not exactly genius.
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
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?
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.
It's not a rerun of 97. Politics and the state of the country are both fundamentally quite different. I understand that as a landslide win for Labour it is a point of comparison, but this will not be 'another 97' or 'another 92'. It'll be 2024.
While a lot of the change is a series of unforced errors by the Conservatives (I still can scarcely believe the stupidity of announcing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2... in Manchester, not a killer point in itself but beautifully illustrative of the state of the Tory party at the moment.), nonetheless SKS has unquestionably done a politically astute move into the centre ground and banished Corbyn's ghost. If Mid Beds can be overturned (in a three horse race, no less), anything is possible.
I don't know if this has been surmised elsewhere, but maybe the third horse drew enough votes from the first horse to let the second horse squeak though? The LibDem intervention could have been helpful to Labour's victory. And would it be rude to suggest that somewhere in deepest central Bedfordshire there remains a core of socially-conservative, semi-rural voters who aren't quite yet ready for an MP called Festus?
They were ready enough to elect a Police & Crime Commissioner called Festus pretty comfortably in 2021.
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.
Again I would go and watch the video I linked.
When France build a High Speed route, they build the track and signalling and connections - routes into cities and stations aren't included because they are treated as different long term projects by different teams.
Our HS2 project consists of
1 new HS route from outside London to Birmingham 2) new stations at Euston, Birmingham.... 3) tunnels into London....
And 2/3 aren't part of the costs elsewhere because it's done elsewhere.
It's worth adding that the cancellation of Crossrail 2 is why the Euston rebuild is so expensive - previously the £1-2bn that rebuilding Euston's underground station was part of the Crossrail 2 budget.
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
Suggest you rejoin, vote for someone sane and/or fight against the extremes. It's a long slog, but you if you vacate the pitch it takes even longer.
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
Suggest you rejoin, vote for someone sane and/or fight against the extremes. It's a long slog, but you if you vacate the pitch it takes even longer.
Thank you but at present with my health issues it is not something I find attractive
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.
So we hope (maybe) that Starmer will have learnt the lessons of Blair's unpreparedness and wasted 2 years, and will come equipped with a set of reform plans, and a pair of emasculators to apply to the relevant senior policy-enforcers at the Treasury.
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?
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?
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.
Cambridge-Coventry-Brum would be fairly easy if you really wanted to go to Brum - I was assuming that like HS2 you'd want to go north side of Brum through the M6 Toll corridor. At the sorts of speeds we're talking, the extra route mileage won't take much extra time.
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
So, game over really. The unenthusiastic 'nothing like 1997 apart from the result' Labour landslide is coming.
Correct. Labour on to win by a 100+ majority. There's no great enthusiasm for Starmer but there's a lot of active contempt and hatred for the Tories, with precious little love to counterbalance that, or fear of Labour among swing voters.
It may well go sour for Starmer quite quickly but if it does, don't expect the Tories to be the beneficiaries.
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
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Interesting that you say Starmer is unfit to be PM, at no point in 2019 did you think Johnson was unfit to be PM, in a straight fight, on suitability to be PM Starmer beats Johnson hands down surely
It depends what you want a PM do be and do. Johnson is a fat lying oaf. He played politics quite neatly in 2019, the idiot remainers in the house of commons needed their heads banging together, he did that pretty effectively, and eventually got a mandate from the country as a result.
Starmer's consistent behavior in demanding ever more and harder lockdowns regardless of the facts on the ground make him the worst sort of authoritarian, and he's therefore obviously completely unsuited to office. That's far worse than playing dirty to force the hand of a house of commons in which all factions were playing dirty to try and get their preferred outcome.
I don't like Johnson, I don't want him back as prime minister - I think he's unsuitable for high office. But if I was given a binary choice, even now, I'd have to take him over someone as bad as Starmer.
You would support Johnson? With HIS record of utter incompetence, lying and laziness?
I think you need your head examined - or at least a lie down in a nice, quiet dark room until you recover
Incompetent bluster beats competent evil. Starmer will do more damage in the next 5 years than the Tories have managed in 13. Covid showed us exactly what Starmer is like inside, and it's not pretty - I can't believe more people don't see it.
I'm not saying I like the current Tory party. I don't - it's a ship of fools, and some quite unpleasant ones at that. I'm currently not even willing to vote for them. But Starmer will be even worse.
Vote Tory because Vote Labour will be worse!!!!
With our system we have to vote Labour. There is no credible alternative. This lot cannot be allowed to continue.
Labour may do things worse - that is a possibility, but we know that the current lot have wrecked Britain and are continuing to f*ck it up more and more every day.
A possibility vs a definite known harm.
I do not like Labour either, but they are the only game in town.
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.
I (hesitantly) predicted Labour wins in both seats, and Lab/Con/LD as the order in MidBeds. So, woo!
After all the speculation that a split between Lab and LD would let the Tories win in MidBeds, I note that it was the split right that saw Labour win. The Reform UK vote was bigger than Labour’s majority in both seats. Indeed, in Tamworth, Reform UK + Britain First + UKIP was nearly 10%!!
Yep - but those Reform UK + Britain First + UKIP won't vote for even the Tory party - the idea that going even further right will result in them winning the seat is a bit insane.
But people in a desperate situation are liable to do insane things. And that may well make things worse.
It is an interesting possibility though. Until yesterday, RefUK et al were the dog that didn't bark. If the Conservatives start losing a meaningful number of votes to their right, proper wipeout becomes possible. Not because RefUK will win (m)any seats, but by taking a 5-10 percent of votes that the Conservatives thought they could count on.
RefUK's vote share in the polling went up about 3pp when Sunak became PM. I don't think it takes a genius to work out what happened there. I suspect that the Tories have forfeited a small but not immaterial chunk of their support as long as he is their leader, no matter what batshit right wing nonsense he comes up with in an effort to win them back.
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.
It's not a rerun of 97. Politics and the state of the country are both fundamentally quite different. I understand that as a landslide win for Labour it is a point of comparison, but this will not be 'another 97' or 'another 92'. It'll be 2024.
While a lot of the change is a series of unforced errors by the Conservatives (I still can scarcely believe the stupidity of announcing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2... in Manchester, not a killer point in itself but beautifully illustrative of the state of the Tory party at the moment.), nonetheless SKS has unquestionably done a politically astute move into the centre ground and banished Corbyn's ghost. If Mid Beds can be overturned (in a three horse race, no less), anything is possible.
I don't know if this has been surmised elsewhere, but maybe the third horse drew enough votes from the first horse to let the second horse squeak though? The LibDem intervention could have been helpful to Labour's victory. And would it be rude to suggest that somewhere in deepest central Bedfordshire there remains a core of socially-conservative, semi-rural voters who aren't quite yet ready for an MP called Festus?
They were ready enough to elect a Police & Crime Commissioner called Festus pretty comfortably in 2021.
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.
Sunak went full driving-gloves gammonbait and got trounced in two by-elections.
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.
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.
Well the result in seats will depend (like all elections) on turnout, relative shares, geographical spread of the vote. Then FPTP does its thing. You know what it's like, that FPTP.
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.
If Labour were to introduce PR, that might be different (though not because Labour would be in power indefinitely; someone would replace them sooner-or-later, and probably about the same time as under FPTP as arrogance and failures build). But PR could cause the Tories to split and/or the right to realign. Even so, one way or another, the right-of-centre would return to power.
It's time for a leadership challenge, with Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch being the main candidates.
Why on Earth would they want it now? Do they want to tick a box or have a career? If the Tories switch, they need an elder statesman to fight a short, sharp campaign and win a few seats. A Michael Howard type. I'm not sure who they have left in the Commons who can do that.
A massive landslide in line with these results will leave Labour in the same position as The SNP in 2015, with lots of MPs elected in seats they would normally not expect to win. In Scotland that meant a lot of numpties and the occasional rouge elected, dependent on slavishly following the leadership line to preserve their lucrative positions and career progression. It will be interesting to see the calibre and performance of Labour's equivalent.
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?
We already had a Charles III north of the wall...
And south, certainly in Derby.
There's a surprisingly kind cairn near Swarkestone Bridge / Causeway (itself very special) in memory of Charles Edward Stuart's about turn.
Piccies:
Local Schoolchildren are less kind. No idea about why the actual decision was made:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie came this way And ran away on washing day."
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.
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
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 will respond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.
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.
The Tories are like Triggers broom. The name doesn't go away; it just gets co-opted by another group.
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
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 will respond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.
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?
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
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.
Same with stuff like public safety warnings for everyone - AIDS commercials and so on.
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....
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.
Unpopular opinion but I disagree. Help to Buy only applied to New Build properties, not existing properties. After years of declining house building levels, and home ownership rates, the decline was reversed and house building rates started to rebound as did home ownership rates. Price to income ratios stabilised too, rather than increasing.
The problem was it was too little, too late, not that it was counterproductive.
We need much, much more building both to cope with rising population levels and to reverse decades of shortages. That is going to need concrete (pun intended) reforms to planning etc not minor tinkering like Help to Buy.
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....
Yeah, they're too young to have gone away in large numbers yet
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....
Brexiteer. Remainer. Terms from the past. Tamworth was heavily for leave and just elected a Labour MP.
So people absolutely think they got what they voted for. Have realised that it is absolutely shit, and are now voting to fix the mess.
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?
We already had a Charles III north of the wall...
And south, certainly in Derby.
There's a surprisingly kind cairn near Swarkestone Bridge / Causeway (itself very special) in memory of Charles Edward Stuart's about turn.
Piccies:
Local Schoolchildren are less kind. No idea about why the actual decision was made:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie came this way And ran away on washing day."
A colleague used to work for a Derby operation - I used to see him at conferences and rib him over a beer on how so unspeakably awful Derby was that CES at the head of an all-conquering blitzkrieg could only take one look and turn back.
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.
Because they are much larger countries where it makes a difference. I am all in favour of a huge expansion in railcapacity but it should not be the High Speed white elephant and it should not be all focused on London. Build more lines going where people want and need to go - more cross country and intra-region. Build more lines suitable for frieght and get stuff off the roads.
Your desperate attachtment to HS2 is illogical and damaging to the economy.
Comments
Just shows where the Tories have gone wrong this parliament - prioritised benefits for the bone idle boomers over capital spending.
https://twitter.com/LewisJWarner/status/1715207893828452455
Cooper would have been of the same standard of MP as his predecessor, Dories, Jared O'Mara etc.
This is the first time the RefUK opinion polling has been reflected in real votes; well ahead of the Greens in Brexity seats, which is what I'd expect, unlike Selby. If this is sustained then the Tories will be in deep trouble in the GE.
Ok-ish for the Lib Dems in Mid-Beds. In practice there won't be many seats where it is unclear who the challenger is at the next GE, and most of those will be such safe seats that the Tories will win anyway. The only seat I can think of where both Labour and LDs will go for it is Wimbledon, and I don't think it will matter because the Tories will come 3rd. Maybe also Colchester, with the same result.
Rising tide of homelessness could bankrupt seaside town
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67076914
How a Labour government handles the economy will be far more significant for the future Tory prospects than Brexit
Your lot have corruptly broken this country so that most basic services are visibly crumbling. Unless you are telling me that every Tory voter has their own private jet, they are using these services and seeing the damage. They want them fixed.
Against the prevailing tide of opinion I would observe:
1. I had expected the Lab maj in Tamworth to be bigger, given the seats electoral history.
2. Nad's conduct was so abysmal a Tory disaster was inevitable in Mid Beds. The earth had been salted.
Doesn't mean we aren't looking at 97 redux next year. But worth bearing in mind.
PS. Or maybe Truss is auditioning for the part of Margaret of Anjou?
Starmer's consistent behavior in demanding ever more and harder lockdowns regardless of the facts on the ground make him the worst sort of authoritarian, and he's therefore obviously completely unsuited to office.
That's far worse than playing dirty to force the hand of a house of commons in which all factions were playing dirty to try and get their preferred outcome.
I don't like Johnson, I don't want him back as prime minister - I think he's unsuitable for high office. But if I was given a binary choice, even now, I'd have to take him over someone as bad as Starmer.
Firstly, that is rubbish. There is a demonstrated need for more north-south capacity; there was in the late 90's early 2000's when the disastrous WCML modernisation program occurred, there was ten years later when HS2 was first proposed, and there is now.
Secondly, there is no reason why we cannot do it all: for instance EWR, NPR and HS2. Preferably as part of a joined-up, integrated network, but
There is this stupid mythical idea that as I want *my* project to go ahead, I need to destroy all competing projects. The stupidity being that in killing a project you don't like, you make it easier for others to kill *your* project. As we're already seeing, NIMBY groups are already having a go at EWR.
We need to build more infrastructure in this country. JFBI.
Since Brexit, Labour has really, really struggled in most of the Midlands; I'd go so far as to say it has been deeply unpopular outside Birmingham and one or two other cities. Tamworth is the first indication that these struggles are easing, and that Brexit has less salience - a trend that should be even stronger by the time of the GE.
I think you need your head examined - or at least a lie down in a nice, quiet dark room until you recover
How hard is it to warmly congratulate the winner, thank your campaign team, say, "Well, by-elections is as by-elections does to the media" and go on holiday for a few days?
Still, champagne corks popping at Eddie Hughes's house.
We could have built a normal, max current UK grade 220km/hr line & captured the overwhelming majority of the economic benefits of HS2.
https://lookstranger.substack.com/p/a-perpetual-vortex?r=8dmga&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
While a lot of the change is a series of unforced errors by the Conservatives (I still can scarcely believe the stupidity of announcing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2... in Manchester, not a killer point in itself but beautifully illustrative of the state of the Tory party at the moment.), nonetheless SKS has unquestionably done a politically astute move into the centre ground and banished Corbyn's ghost. If Mid Beds can be overturned (in a three horse race, no less), anything is possible.
Remember that it isn't the speed that is the reason for the failure of the project. The DfT and Treasury have both endlessly fiddled with the specs - which adds huge cost - and have demanded that the infrastructure be able to withstand the breakup of the earth at the contractor's risk - which adds huge cost.
We could have built a 360kph railway for a fraction of the cost. But we didn't because we're worse than the Belgians and the Spanish and the Italians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Russian_presidential_election
It’s quite noticeable that a further call up of reservists has been put off.
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.
@JohnRentoul
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Having outlasted Liz Truss, the lettuce and the Earl of Bute, Rishi Sunak is 4 days away from overtaking Alec Douglas-Home
Anyone do better?
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.
Starmer will do more damage in the next 5 years than the Tories have managed in 13. Covid showed us exactly what Starmer is like inside, and it's not pretty - I can't believe more people don't see it.
I'm not saying I like the current Tory party. I don't - it's a ship of fools, and some quite unpleasant ones at that. I'm currently not even willing to vote for them. But Starmer will be even worse.
You do have to ask how on earth did the Tories manage to select *that* as their candidate. Vetting?
Mind, cancelling HS2 just when they have almost finished building it would be the optimal solution for them. So not exactly genius.
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
When France build a High Speed route, they build the track and signalling and connections - routes into cities and stations aren't included because they are treated as different long term projects by different teams.
Our HS2 project consists of
1 new HS route from outside London to Birmingham
2) new stations at Euston, Birmingham....
3) tunnels into London....
And 2/3 aren't part of the costs elsewhere because it's done elsewhere.
It's worth adding that the cancellation of Crossrail 2 is why the Euston rebuild is so expensive - previously the £1-2bn that rebuilding Euston's underground station was part of the Crossrail 2 budget.
At the sorts of speeds we're talking, the extra route mileage won't take much extra time.
It may well go sour for Starmer quite quickly but if it does, don't expect the Tories to be the beneficiaries.
With our system we have to vote Labour. There is no credible alternative. This lot cannot be allowed to continue.
Labour may do things worse - that is a possibility, but we know that the current lot have wrecked Britain and are continuing to f*ck it up more and more every day.
A possibility vs a definite known harm.
I do not like Labour either, but they are the only game in town.
1) the selection of Starmer over Long-Bailey
2) the pandemic
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
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.
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.
If Labour were to introduce PR, that might be different (though not because Labour would be in power indefinitely; someone would replace them sooner-or-later, and probably about the same time as under FPTP as arrogance and failures build). But PR could cause the Tories to split and/or the right to realign. Even so, one way or another, the right-of-centre would return to power.
Gove???
/ Causeway (itself very special) in memory of Charles Edward Stuart's about turn.
Piccies:
Local Schoolchildren are less kind. No idea about why the actual decision was made:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie came this way
And ran away on washing day."
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?
The problem was it was too little, too late, not that it was counterproductive.
We need much, much more building both to cope with rising population levels and to reverse decades of shortages. That is going to need concrete (pun intended) reforms to planning etc not minor tinkering like Help to Buy.
So people absolutely think they got what they voted for. Have realised that it is absolutely shit, and are now voting to fix the mess.
Your desperate attachtment to HS2 is illogical and damaging to the economy.