I note the state pension will be going up 8.5% in April, due this time to wage tracking.
"September 2023’s figures show that average wages rose by 8.5%, which is much higher than 2.5% and the inflation rate of 6.7%."
Previously going up by 10.1% in line with inflation.
So a 19.5% increase over 2 years.
If it had been done in line with inflation, the increase would have been up 17.5% over 2 years; in line with wages would have been 16.4%. But because of the idiosyncratic formula it's 19.5% !
The triple lock is one of the most absurd and stupid policies I've ever seen. Why should pensioners' incomes always grow in real terms and rise in relation to wages? If continued indefinitely it would result in all of national income being given to pensioners! It's a farce, a joke, and an insult to working people and their children who are being fleeced by the pensioner lobby and the politicians they have captured. If pensioners want to have more money they can work for it or save for it like the rest of us. Enough!
It's the fraternal twin of the fuel duty freeze: a Hotel California policy that is almost possible to exit without major electoral damage.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
I note the state pension will be going up 8.5% in April, due this time to wage tracking.
"September 2023’s figures show that average wages rose by 8.5%, which is much higher than 2.5% and the inflation rate of 6.7%."
Previously going up by 10.1% in line with inflation.
So a 19.5% increase over 2 years.
If it had been done in line with inflation, the increase would have been up 17.5% over 2 years; in line with wages would have been 16.4%. But because of the idiosyncratic formula it's 19.5% !
The triple lock is one of the most absurd and stupid policies I've ever seen. Why should pensioners' incomes always grow in real terms and rise in relation to wages? If continued indefinitely it would result in all of national income being given to pensioners! It's a farce, a joke, and an insult to working people and their children who are being fleeced by the pensioner lobby and the politicians they have captured. If pensioners want to have more money they can work for it or save for it like the rest of us. Enough!
It's the fraternal twin of the fuel duty freeze: a Hotel California policy that is almost possible to exit without major electoral damage.
The state pension should be linked to GDP per capita. That would focus some minds.
I note the state pension will be going up 8.5% in April, due this time to wage tracking.
"September 2023’s figures show that average wages rose by 8.5%, which is much higher than 2.5% and the inflation rate of 6.7%."
Previously going up by 10.1% in line with inflation.
So a 19.5% increase over 2 years.
If it had been done in line with inflation, the increase would have been up 17.5% over 2 years; in line with wages would have been 16.4%. But because of the idiosyncratic formula it's 19.5% !
As we all appreciate by now, there's nothing idiosyncratic about the Triple Lock. It's a one-way ratchet that's custom built to ensure that increases in pensioner incomes outstrip wage inflation, and is yet another example of catastrophically myopic policy making.
The response to some pensioners still being a bit hard up was to give the lot of them these gold-plated hikes, so that their incomes would catch up with those of younger people. Of course, having been created, pensioners now expect the perk to be maintained in perpetuity, and they're such an important constituency that nobody dare alienate them by junking the policy, because their political opponents won't make the same mistake and the grey vote will simply flow away. Therefore we really are lumbered with the bloody thing.
Of course, with compound interest (or inflation) being the most powerful force in the universe, the logical end point of the Triple Lock is that (unless wages outstrip both inflation and 2.5% every single year, which ain't happening,) the working age population will eventually be obliged to hand over its entire income in tax simply to fund oldies' handouts. The system will implode before things get quite that out of hand, of course, but when the guarantee is finally binned there will be scenes. You can well appreciate why nobody wants to be the one in charge when the call is eventually forced upon them.
You are Gordon Brown who gave the pensioners a 75p a week rise once, and I claim my £5.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
On the first point - I suspect the share of the electorate who would vote Labour if only they introduced VAT on private schools is much less than 0.5%, whereas the proportion of the electorate who might vote Labour but are put off by fear of VAT on private schools is about 2%. Now they have a big enough lead to get away with it this time, and it is probably a good policy on balance, but I am pretty sure it is not electorally helpful.
Just to develop what I mean. This policy reassures leftish voters (eg me) worried about too much 'tory lite' centrism under Starmer that the party's heart is still in the right place and at the same time it polls well in their primary target - the Red Wall.
They have plenty of other targets now (given the Tory meltdown and consequent prospect of a huge landslide) but winning back the Red Wall remains first and foremost. It's the sine qua non of a Labour GE victory.
There are other policies that would achieve this double of appealing to both the left and the Red Wall - eg nationalizing various things - but they are all either expensive or hard to implement. This one is neither. It's very doable.
This isn’t the best argument for £100k a year not to be considered all that much
"You are absolutely right, that is not very much."
This caller manages to convince ＠RachelSJohnson that £100k doesn't go very far, as he tells her he and his wife are left with approximately £600 a week after taxes and bills.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
I note the state pension will be going up 8.5% in April, due this time to wage tracking.
"September 2023’s figures show that average wages rose by 8.5%, which is much higher than 2.5% and the inflation rate of 6.7%."
Previously going up by 10.1% in line with inflation.
So a 19.5% increase over 2 years.
If it had been done in line with inflation, the increase would have been up 17.5% over 2 years; in line with wages would have been 16.4%. But because of the idiosyncratic formula it's 19.5% !
The triple lock is one of the most absurd and stupid policies I've ever seen. Why should pensioners' incomes always grow in real terms and rise in relation to wages? If continued indefinitely it would result in all of national income being given to pensioners! It's a farce, a joke, and an insult to working people and their children who are being fleeced by the pensioner lobby and the politicians they have captured. If pensioners want to have more money they can work for it or save for it like the rest of us. Enough!
It's the fraternal twin of the fuel duty freeze: a Hotel California policy that is almost possible to exit without major electoral damage.
The state pension should be linked to GDP per capita. That would focus some minds.
It would focus minds on voting for whichever party promised they wouldn't do it. The pensioners' union is only going to get more and more important as a voting bloc as our population continues to age. Working age people simply won't have the numbers to influence policy anymore. It's marginal already.
The only fix I can see is a big bang package of reform, that contains both costs and benefits. For example a one-time significant uprating of the OAP, by something like 10 or 15%, accompanied by a further increase in the pensionable age (or perhaps a stepped phasing in of the pension to encourage people to work part time for longer), and an abandonment of the triple lock in favour of increases linked to only one variable.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
Forty years ago. Forecasting is a tad more sophisticated now.
My mobile phone has more computing power than the 'supercomputer' the Met Office had at that time.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
You make a good case for tidal vs nuclear - as we've agreed before.
But it's not going to power Europe - or even the whole of the UK.
(And nuclear can, of course, be built more cheaply than we're doing - as a number of recent S Korean export orders have demonstrated.)
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
Turnout, or lack of it, is going to be crucial in the General Election. How many previous Tory voters will sit on their hands? Labour's Conservative Lite policies won't scare them back to the polling booths.
How many former Conservative voters want "Tory Lite"?
How many current Labour voters want "Tory Lite"?
It is a product without a market.
23% of voters in 2010 went for Clegg’s orange book LDs, which is pretty much what Tory Lite is; plus arguably Cameron certainly ‘presented’ as Tory-lite (even if austerity was not, in practice).
It’s not in favour at the moment simply because we did it and it was rubbish, pretty much.
I don’t think Starmer’s Labour is Tory-lite either. But I think making outward displays of intent around spending constraint is just electorally sensible.
All this "Support for Reform (and Green) will be squeezed in the election" argument ignores how, in 2010, LibDem support went up over the course of the election campaign. Indeed, if not as spectacularly, LibDem support often rises in election campaigns. Maybe Reform and Green will benefit from similar forces.
Yebbut the 2010 Cleggasm is, let's face it, unlikely to manifest as a 2024 Daveygasm.... The guy has zero charisma, sex appeal, showbiz razzamatazz.
He will offer the WASPI women some cash. That will be a fabulous aphrodisiac from Mr Dull. The home counties will be hot for Ed's party.
He could offer them £50k each. So what? He'll never be in a position to deliver it. Even if Starmer needs him for a coalition, Labour won't have the money to spare.
Davey's problem is that he has history. He was a cabinet minister in a Tory-led govt. He didn't deliver then for WASPI. I don't think he will necessarily prosper during the election campaign when these points are raised.
No-one will be at all interested in what the LDs or Davey say during the campaign.
The discussions that attract the most attention in order will be:
Con v Refuk Con internal arguments Con v Labour
Then various nationalists locally and the greens. Then Ed Davey.
I am not sure this is necessarily a bad thing for the LDs.....
Election campaigns have reporting rules that guarantee coverage for smaller parties. Sure, that doesn't mean the public will pay attention to that coverage, but it helps.
Several election campaigns have surprised in terms of what the public chose to pay attention to (Cleggasm in 2010, paying for social care and policing in 2017), while others were more predictable (getting Brexit done in 2019).
My original point upthread was not predicting that the LibDems would benefit from increased campaign-mandated attention (although I think they probably will to a degree), but about what might happen with Reform UK and the Greens. Will they get their equivalent of the Cleggasm? Lots of people assume that Reform UK and Greens will be squeezed during the campaign, but they'll be getting lots of mandated coverage. They could go up in the polls over the campaign, not down.
No-one will be interested in what the Lib Dems have to say because they don't have anything interesting to say. That's quite different from no-one - media or public - being willing to listen to what they have to say.
Things are interesting if people think they are. In principle - and actually in practice - it is the same as whether people are willing to listen
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
Forty years ago. Forecasting is a tad more sophisticated now.
My mobile phone has more computing power than the 'supercomputer' the Met Office had at that time.
The error was also, in the scheme of things, quite localised too. All models were forecasting strong winds across the Southern part of the country and Northern France. What the Met Office computer got wrong was 1. the explosive cyclogenesis and sting jet formation, and 2. the track, meaning that quite a localised area of the South East got blasted unexpectedly.
Even with October 1987 levels of forecasting skill the impact on wind generation estimates would have been pretty limited.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
One design idea is to mount turbines on causeway bridge structures across Morecambe Bay towards Barrow In Furness. The turbines could be raised to bridge level for maintenance. The problem is scouring around the bridge pillars.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
Go look at La Rance, Brittany. Installed in the mid-1960's. Recently overhauled after continuous production in a marine environment. They didn't even need to replace all the turbines.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
You make a good case for tidal vs nuclear - as we've agreed before.
But it's not going to power Europe - or even the whole of the UK.
(And nuclear can, of course, be built more cheaply than we're doing - as a number of recent S Korean export orders have demonstrated.)
But my numbers don't even account for nuclear needing a 24-7 armed force to protect them. Nor of the costs of storing waste materials for umpteen millennia. Nor the costs of dismantling each of these plants after 60 years. The last top-end number I saw for dismantling Britain's nuclear facilities was in 2019: £222 billion. Even those might be too low - the company tasked with decommissioning Dounreay went into administration last year.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
Go look at La Rance, Brittany. Installed in the mid-1960's. Recently overhauled after continuous production in a marine environment. They didn't even need to replace all the turbines.
I know of what I speak!
-1 for not linking to this week's guest magazine "Power Engineering International"
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
The risk is that its revenue neutral but will result in extra costs as some children will end up being state rather than privately educated. That literally is the only card that can be played against the policy but would only work with a few people like @Cookie who understand how educational selection works
The target figure to stay revenue positive is less than 20% of private school students switching to state provision because of the additional cost, which in principle should also be 20%. Private school fees have increased by significantly more than 20% in real terms in recent years anyway.
There is a contradiction in the policy though. To be successful state education has to be seen as inferior to private by a bigger margin than before.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
The risk is that its revenue neutral but will result in extra costs as some children will end up being state rather than privately educated. That literally is the only card that can be played against the policy but would only work with a few people like @Cookie who understand how educational selection works
Yes it's an interesting one. Because for some people (eg those of an egalitarian bent) if it leads to less kids going to private school that's another card FOR it.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
Go look at La Rance, Brittany. Installed in the mid-1960's. Recently overhauled after continuous production in a marine environment. They didn't even need to replace all the turbines.
I know of what I speak!
-1 for not linking to this week's guest magazine "Power Engineering International"
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
I would be surprised if the turbines lasted 60 years for tidal - even 10 years would be a lot. Welcome to the surf zone.
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
Go look at La Rance, Brittany. Installed in the mid-1960's. Recently overhauled after continuous production in a marine environment. They didn't even need to replace all the turbines.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
It does remain the case, though, that there are occasional period when there is virtually no useful wind across most of Europe, for perhaps two weeks at a time.
So even with continent wide interconnects, we'll have to plan for it. But that's far from impossible or impossibly expensive.
You think? With what - capacity idle most of the time? You build tidal, which works 14 hours a day, trapping water on the rising and releasing it on the falling tide, twice a day. Dotted around the coast and synched with differing times of high tides, you can get a significant level of baseload. Each and every day. With utter predictability.
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
You make a good case for tidal vs nuclear - as we've agreed before.
But it's not going to power Europe - or even the whole of the UK.
(And nuclear can, of course, be built more cheaply than we're doing - as a number of recent S Korean export orders have demonstrated.)
But my numbers don't even account for nuclear needing a 24-7 armed force to protect them. Nor of the costs of storing waste materials for umpteen millennia. Nor the costs of dismantling each of these plants after 60 years. The last top-end number I saw for dismantling Britain's nuclear facilities was in 2019: £222 billion. Even those might be too low - the company tasked with decommissioning Dounreay went into administration last year.
I note the state pension will be going up 8.5% in April, due this time to wage tracking.
"September 2023’s figures show that average wages rose by 8.5%, which is much higher than 2.5% and the inflation rate of 6.7%."
Previously going up by 10.1% in line with inflation.
So a 19.5% increase over 2 years.
If it had been done in line with inflation, the increase would have been up 17.5% over 2 years; in line with wages would have been 16.4%. But because of the idiosyncratic formula it's 19.5% !
The triple lock is one of the most absurd and stupid policies I've ever seen. Why should pensioners' incomes always grow in real terms and rise in relation to wages? If continued indefinitely it would result in all of national income being given to pensioners! It's a farce, a joke, and an insult to working people and their children who are being fleeced by the pensioner lobby and the politicians they have captured. If pensioners want to have more money they can work for it or save for it like the rest of us. Enough!
It's the fraternal twin of the fuel duty freeze: a Hotel California policy that is almost possible to exit without major electoral damage.
What's wrong with the fuel duty freeze?
Fuel duty isn't just being frozen, it's being abolished long term.
The Treasury got addicted to fleecing drivers for billions of pounds per annum, it still does but it won't be able to via fuel duty before long.
So it makes sense if that easy golden goose is being removed in the long term that the Treasury should detox slowly in finding alternative revenue sources rather than suddenly finding a huge black hole that needs filling due to mismanagement.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
Wind intermittency is a sizeable issue but it can be overstated. There is huge demand variation anyway. Adding unaligned supply variation in one energy source is just another variable. Wind's role in the mix comes down to cost of production and how easily it can be switched off. If production is cheap you can afford to build lots of farms that stay idle for significant periods. At a certain % of energy mix the cost of the alternative supply/storage gets to be too much. But we're still a long way from that point for onshore wind.
Nuclear suffers both from being highly inflexible (it can't easily be switched off) and having very high baseload costs. No-one has ever managed to make the business case stack up. But one station can generate huge amounts of electricity.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
At my younger daughter’s private school, the bursar tells me that they have unmeetable demand at current prices.
They could double the price - but that would simply make the student body 100% mega rich plus scholarships.
They have concerns about the resulting social structure in the school, which they reckon would have a negative outcome in the medium term.
As it is, they are at 20% of 100% equivalent scholarships. That is, the scholarship funding is equivalent to 20% of places fully funded, but is spread more than that.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
When it comes to batteries, cars pretty much solve the problem too anyway.
30 million EVs on the road at 60 kWh average size is distributed 1.8 terrawatt hours.
When we have too much wind, just charge your vehicle for cheap. Problem solved.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
What's wrong with that?
If the business is badly managed, it should go bust, its assets sold to a new utility firm at pennies on the pound and any bondholders and shareholders should be wiped out.
We're far too fragile about letting companies fail. Companies failing is part of a healthy free market, those who failed to do due diligence should get burnt not the consumers.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
.@anneapplebaum : “Trump has decided that he doesn’t want money to go to Ukraine…It's a really extraordinary moment; we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect, dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator.”
Everything she says is right up until the last sentence.
We don’t *know* that Trump’s motive is to dictate American foreign policy “with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind”
An alternative scenario - which I think is plausible (although I don’t know) is he opposes Ukraine because Biden is in favour of it. It may, of course, also be Trump’s long standing dependence on Russian money.
But to make an unsupported allegation of treason and for it to pass unremarked is surprising
Whatever Trump's motivation, the effect is the same: to aid Putins war of aggression.
Three red judges and one from the Appeal Court have resigned from the Garrick. It's all happening. Could there soon be a day like 21 May 1981 in Italy? (Joke!)
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
Yes. We don't want another Thames Water situation. Scandalous rip-off of consumers and taxpayers.
The link with politics and affiliation is really strong. The less trusting the area, the more likely to vote for radical parties. And you can pretty much map the most trusting locations to Lib Dem seats or targets.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
My fear is that the big losers will be those on the next step down the ladder - i.e. those whose kids would have previously got into that 'good' state school but who no longer will because there is no space, because the kids who would have previously gone private are not doing so. i.e. my kids.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
Whilst that is obviously desirable the current state of play is that we have to sell about £80bn of assets a year to balance our current account deficit. This has, over the last 20-30 years resulted in most of our wealth producing assets falling into foreign hands with the future profits being off shored. If we want to stop this we need to reduce our deficit. Its really as simple (and as difficult) as that.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
We will still have twats like Mogg, Johnson, Tristram Hunt (Eton) Acland-Hood (St Paul's) Spielman (Roedean) Simon Case (Bristol Grammar School) Jeremy Hunt (Charterhouse).
How much this policy will raise on that basis as against the extra cost to the state elsewhere is questionable.
Hence why my idea was to disendow the public schools.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
What's wrong with that?
If the business is badly managed, it should go bust, its assets sold to a new utility firm at pennies on the pound and any bondholders and shareholders should be wiped out.
We're far too fragile about letting companies fail. Companies failing is part of a healthy free market, those who failed to do due diligence should get burnt not the consumers.
But when companies fail, because of limited liability, people do get burnt.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
This is where we really miss Charles.
Ah well I know he's dead against this policy because we discussed it a few times.
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
It's already become even more elitist, that was point crossed a while ago. School fees for even minor private schools are so high in relation to salaries that the scrimper and saver who puts their kid into private school is relatively outdated when yearly fees for middling ones are getting on for the average salary before tax. You're not getting there by skipping a holiday or two, you have to already be what to most people is a top earner to have it as an option.
Which I suspect is why Labour feel confident about this policy in a way did not 20-30 years ago - the aspirational middle classes already feel cut off private schooling as an educational choice. So are much happier to see those who can make it taxed on it, as do see as bestowing an unfair advantage on the wealthy rather than something can reasonably aspire to with next year's pay rise or some cutting back.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
You could strip the duty away from fuel and add on the difference (In the round) set during the MOT which accounts for
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor 2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
What's wrong with that?
If the business is badly managed, it should go bust, its assets sold to a new utility firm at pennies on the pound and any bondholders and shareholders should be wiped out.
We're far too fragile about letting companies fail. Companies failing is part of a healthy free market, those who failed to do due diligence should get burnt not the consumers.
Which would be fine in your global libertarian utopia. That's not the world we live in, and never will be.
The gender gaps in Western voting patterns is really interesting to me, and shows (quite clearly to me) the social nature of gender and how it is and was constructed. Post industrial revolution until very recently (the last 50 years) it was considered the "man's job" to be the breadwinner - the sole provider for the household. This was, in part, the message sold to men to give them a special status within capitalism - prior to capitalism (and for the most poor and underprivileged populations) both men and women having to work was common. By shifting the spaces in which "men" and "women" worked - the wage space for men and the house for women - it privileged men and reinforced a stricter gender and familial hierarchy.
In the modern era, for good reasons (equity) and bad (capitalism needing growth and more workers), with women in the workplace being normalised (if not equalised) you have a problem - society still teaches men they are supposed to be the breadwinner, and men still internalise that, but it is almost impossible to live that life (unless you already come from wealth). This has a tendency to mean men (as a population, not every man) are more likely to have resentful feelings towards the economic situation as a whole, and in times of economic hardship (which I would argue we've been in since 2008) more so.
The outcomes of this environment mean men (again, as a population, not every individual man), who have been taught that they should be able to provide for their family and be strong, are affected by this in negative ways (the higher depression and suicide rates amongst working age men, why men are more likely to commit crimes than women, etc.) and leads to men wanting to feel secure via culturally reactive methods that reinstate the old status quo of male supremacy over the household.
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
Have you ever BEEN to the Garrick? The main problem is the unutterable DULLNESS
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
That would be remarkable. The number is a lot more than four. ..The four judges were among dozens in the legal profession now known to have been members. Their number included a further four appeal court judges, five more high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors...
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
It's already become even more elitist, that was point crossed a while ago. School fees for even minor private schools are so high in relation to salaries that the scrimper and saver who puts their kid into private school is relatively outdated when yearly fees for middling ones are getting on for the average salary before tax. You're not getting there by skipping a holiday or two, you have to already be what to most people is a top earner to have it as an option.
Which I suspect is why Labour feel confident about this policy in a way did not 20-30 years ago - the aspirational middle classes already feel cut off private schooling as an educational choice. So are much happier to see those who can make it taxed on it, as do see as bestowing an unfair advantage on the wealthy rather than something can reasonably aspire to with next year's pay rise or some cutting back.
Fees for Dundee High School, where my kids went, are now edging up to £16k a year, which is a big jump on what we paid. A lot of the children there are the sons or daughters of 2 professionals such as doctors. 20 years ago there were more children of lawyers and the like but they are being squeezed.
The shortfall has largely been met by immigrant families who really value education. I think that you are overstating it to say that the scrimpers and savers do not still pay a significant role. Whether they give up the fight after the imposition of VAT (and, at least in Scotland, significantly higher rates bills than hitherto) remains to be seen but DHS has recently had 2 waves of redundancies. I really don't see how this improves the prospects for UK plc.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
I don't think the class privilege reinforced by the likes of Eton is mitigated by a few more middle class parents using lower tier private schools.
Of course it's right to say this policy is no silver bullet for that either. There's no quick and easy way to fix something so deeply embedded.
The Garrick could solve its problem in a minute by throwing open its doors to women but staying exactly as it is. Dull, stuffy, with poor food and billiards tables
No women will join anyway, but the Guardian won’t have anything to moan about
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
That would be remarkable. The number is a lot more than four. ..The four judges were among dozens in the legal profession now known to have been members. Their number included a further four appeal court judges, five more high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors...
Yes, I was in the Garrick only once as a guest of a QC who I had brought in to lead me in a Supreme Court case. It was obvious that there were a lot of senior silks there and many no doubt found themselves on the bench. But at that point they should really have thought about whether their continued membership was compatible with their judicial oath to "do right by all manner of people, without fear or favour, affection or ill will, according to the laws and usages of the realm."
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
At my younger daughter’s private school, the bursar tells me that they have unmeetable demand at current prices.
They could double the price - but that would simply make the student body 100% mega rich plus scholarships.
They have concerns about the resulting social structure in the school, which they reckon would have a negative outcome in the medium term.
As it is, they are at 20% of 100% equivalent scholarships. That is, the scholarship funding is equivalent to 20% of places fully funded, but is spread more than that.
Artfully covering all the angles there, that Bursar!
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
Have you ever BEEN to the Garrick? The main problem is the unutterable DULLNESS
Yes, see my further comment. I was quite impressed but in an out of town tourist kind of way.
Surprising that it is still legal for any organisation to refuse membership on the basis of gender.
You'd ban the Women's Institute ?
Quite. I'd be wary of banning such clubs and societies. Recently at the level of cricket that my ageing body aspires to, we have seen more and more girls and women playing in men's teams (they were never actually mens teams, but in practice that has been the situation for hundreds of years at club level. On the one hand its great - spreading the love of the greatest game etc. On another level - one of the reasons for still playing at 51 is the banter with your mates. And with women there its different. Not worse necessarily, and don't get the impression of old misogenistic dinosaurs, but its different.
I believe that a group of men have the right to form a club that excludes women. I believe that a group of women have the right to form a club that excludes men.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
I don't think the class privilege reinforced by the likes of Eton is mitigated by a few more middle class parents using lower tier private schools.
Of course it's right to say this policy is no silver bullet for that either. There's no quick and easy way to fix something so deeply embedded.
What about by councils using private schools for children with EHCPs, now at over 50% of the intake in some schools?
This might be mitigated of course by councils taking such schools over. But they're very resistant to doing so. Taxpayers and the DfE both get very stuffy about it.
The gender gaps in Western voting patterns is really interesting to me, and shows (quite clearly to me) the social nature of gender and how it is and was constructed. Post industrial revolution until very recently (the last 50 years) it was considered the "man's job" to be the breadwinner - the sole provider for the household. This was, in part, the message sold to men to give them a special status within capitalism - prior to capitalism (and for the most poor and underprivileged populations) both men and women having to work was common. By shifting the spaces in which "men" and "women" worked - the wage space for men and the house for women - it privileged men and reinforced a stricter gender and familial hierarchy.
So with footbinding in China, female genital mutilation, and say the village council (mir) system in Russia, hierarchy (or patriarchy to use a more precise word) wasn't so strict before capitalism?
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Given car fuel expenditure does not correlate at all well with income, its a highly regressive tax.
Poor drivers spend a far higher proportion of their income on fuel than well off drivers do.
And poorer drivers currently tend to have less efficient vehicles too.
There's no need to replace it with tax on driving, driving should be no more heavily taxed than rail use or any other transportation.
I missed the previous thread on the Greens, but I do think that this will be the main opportunity for more Green MPs and if it doesn't happen at this GE then it won't happen.
I say this because the Green target seats like Bristol West (the only one I've canvassed for) are in areas where a) the Tories will never win and b) Labour centrism isn't appreciated by the core voters. I remember door knocking in Bristol at the last GE and heard many on the door say "Thangham's okay, but I'm really voting for Corbyn". Those voters are easy pick ups for the Greens, who are already doing well in local elections in these areas as well.
This may be wishful thinking, but I really think we could see 4-5 Green MPs in the next parliament that pick off some of the most left wing typically Labour seats. I doubt that would actually worry SKS that much, but (in my mind) it would change the nature of the parties - with Labour taking the spot of One Nation / Cameroon Toryism, Reform taking up the right flank, the LDs taking up the centre / left and the Greens being the clear left party. I do not see how the Tory party survives without it merging with Reform - and at this point it is possible that the Tory brand is worse regarded and therefore will die.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
You could strip the duty away from fuel and add on the difference (In the round) set during the MOT which accounts for
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor 2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
Drove….. strictly speaking was driven ….. into Outer SW London yesterday. Was quite impressed with the effect of the 20mph limit; actually seemed to speed up traffic, because the amount of jams seemed less than I expected. Secondly petrol seemed significantly more expensive than in N and Mid Essex; we’d filled up at £1.33 a litre; we were driving past fuel stations announcing £1.50 and above. On the motorway it was £1.70! Thirdly grandson-in-law left to go the Kings Cross, on a casually available electric bike, which granddaughter assured us were readily available on an app, and which, she also assured us, were an excellent way for her and her friends to get about London. She told us she was looking forward to them being available in the Yorkshire city where they live.
Ignoring tidal and getting the taxpayer to stump up for more offshore wind (when companies won't even invest unless the Government raises the price per kh to stupid levels) is cretinous. £8.3bn to erect floating windmills in case it's blowy, meanwhile the tides come in and go out every day like clockwork and we fail to harness them.
It doesn't have to be either or.
Given that this announcement would have been an opportunity to revive the prospect of tidal going ahead, I think this windmill announcement shows it's absolutely an either or. *This* is what they've been percolating away in all those years of having zero policies?
If the next government did nothing else other than speed up planning for major projects, it would be a vast improvement on what we have.
I really think that the failure of tidal to take off thus far is because there's no grifting money in things that actually work, and produce power for sensible money and in a timely fashion. Contrast with the truly eye watering sums involved in nuclear investment, or the subsidy jungle of wind.
Tidal is big bang expensive construction projects; lots of concrete. It’s a lot like nuclear in that respect. Not as big as nuclear, but still.
Wind is incremental - you can build it out one turbine at a time if you want to.
Why not do both if feasible. We all know problem with the wind is you cannot depend on it.
The tides we know are a given. Can it be made to work though ?
One problem with tidal is that it’s predictable but annoyingly periodic in a way that doesn’t line up with the 24 hour day over time. So you still have the problem that to actually use this power you really need to be able to store it somewhere, which drives up costs. Otherwise you’re going to spend half the year selling it into the market at off-peak times when you have power, so your return on capital is nowhere near what you’d expect from a naive calculation based on the mean electricity price.
Neither wind nor tidal can delivery power at short notice when you need it. You either need peak power plants (basically natgas at the moment) or batteries on a huge scale.
This isn’t actually too bad though - in the short term we already have the natgas plants & if we only use them for filling in the gaps then the CO2 impact is small & batteries are only getting cheaper over time. It’s already getting to the point that installing a battery in your house (+ ancillery gear) and paying spot for electricity is a net win for many people.
It is a very superficial analysis to conflate the periodical nature of tides with the totally unpredictable intermittency of wind. Along with the constraint payments to wind providers, use of wind has also driven up the price of gas, as gas providers are forced to switch their plants on and off at extremely short notice, which they charge for, and adds to the price of gas (something never mentioned by those who try to sell the idea that wind will become cheaper than gas). You don't get that with tidal - it is totally predictable, and you can line up your other power generators accordingly.
Besides which (@MarqueeMark can maybe remind us the answer here) do tidal barrages not generate power when the tide comes in, and then again when it goes out? Seems like it would be working for much of the time.
I'm a big fan of tidal, and I don't think we should have a big argument of tidal v wind. Just do both.
However, it's not true to say that wind power is totally unpredictable. Wind power forecasts for a few days in advance are reasonably accurate.
The things that really are unpredictable, and caused a challenge for the grid, are when a whole power plant falls off the grid instantly. This happened in the St Jude's Day storm when the cable connecting a nuclear power plant to the grid was knocked out, and more recently when the cable connecting a wind farm to the grid failed.
The predictable gradual increase/decrease of wind power as a cyclone moves across the country is much easier to deal with.
Michael Fish begs to differ.
If you're that ignorant about the subject matter then it's pointless discussing it.
You should try to differentiate between being flippant to make a serious point and being ignorant. Constraint payments to gas providers due to wind unreliability are a fact. The fact that wind can drop out completey during a cold snap is fact. The fact that it can get too windy and force wind farms to constrain is fact. I don't know why you're trying to sell the notion that because we have quite good ways of knowing if it's going to be windy the next day, this helps wind power be anything less than shit, but frankly, 'Michael Foot' is about the only answer it's worth.
You weren't making a serious point.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
It's also about what you think the right version of the question is. Should our primary focus be "what's the optimal endpoint that solves our problem completely?" or "what's the most useful next step we can take that's probably heading in the right sort of direction?"
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
For me, the solution to the uncertainty of wind has already been found with the large increase in interconnectors. If we have surplus energy when the wind blows we simply supply it to our neighbours in Europe who are not so well located for off shore wind. That buys us credit to buy back power when the wind doesn't blow. I am not saying we won't need any battery power but the need is massively reduced from what was contemplated a few years ago.
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Important, I think, that much of these utility assets should be domestically owned.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
What's wrong with that?
If the business is badly managed, it should go bust, its assets sold to a new utility firm at pennies on the pound and any bondholders and shareholders should be wiped out.
We're far too fragile about letting companies fail. Companies failing is part of a healthy free market, those who failed to do due diligence should get burnt not the consumers.
Which would be fine in your global libertarian utopia. That's not the world we live in, and never will be.
Sorry but it absolutely is the world we live in.
In America utility firms go bust quite regularly, their shareholders and bondholders get burnt but the firm enters and exits bankruptcy protection and the customers don't pay the price, the shareholders and bondholders do as they should do.
Sadly here we bailout the bondholders most especially if not the shareholders, rather than letting them take full responsibility for their own actions. That's a political choice, not a law of the markets.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
You could strip the duty away from fuel and add on the difference (In the round) set during the MOT which accounts for
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor 2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
Should be the 4th power of axle weight times the number of axles [which is proportional to road wear].
Though that might see VW releasing a 10 wheeled Golf...
The Garrick could solve its problem in a minute by throwing open its doors to women but staying exactly as it is. Dull, stuffy, with poor food and billiards tables
No women will join anyway, but the Guardian won’t have anything to moan about
One would imagine that a great many of the goods and services targeted at the rich are, in fact, shockingly mediocre, and all that one is really paying for is exclusivity. The proles can't have this, therefore I have made it.
If you are genuinely wealthy then wading through all the crud to identify what's actually worth your time must feel like hard work. But, nonetheless, it's a nice problem to have.
There may well be more to this story than a small number of influential males in central London enjoying all-male company every so often in their lives - and paying to have access to all-male spaces where doubtless the snowflakes feel ever so safe and cosy, just as if they were back in the prefects' common room at school.
Am I alone in finding it remarkable that 4 judges thought continued membership was consistent with their status until now? Better the sinner that repents etc but jeez, you would have thought that was obvious.
Have you ever BEEN to the Garrick? The main problem is the unutterable DULLNESS
Yes, see my further comment. I was quite impressed but in an out of town tourist kind of way.
The premises are magnificent. And the location. And the history
On topic (or at least related to the topic): In the US, men and women voted about the same for the two major parties, for decades. That was generally true until the 1980 election. (If anything, women voters tended to be more Republican, because the women from Catholic immigrant groups were slower to participate in politics, after women's suffrage.)
Peace was more important for women, prosperity more important for men. When Reagan campaigned for a more confrontational approach to the "evil empire", he did better among men. And the gap that opened then has continued ever since, hitting a maximum during Trump's two runs.
There are other reasons for the gap, of course. Without going into details, I can say that men and women disagree far more than they once did on how men and women should relate to each other. One can see some of the reasons for that disagreement in the popularity of two influential magazines, Ms. and Playboy. (By the way, Playboy was ahead of many feminists in backing legalized abortion -- for obvious reasons.)
(I see no obvous solutions to that disagreement, which has done so much damage to the US in recent decades.)
The gender gaps in Western voting patterns is really interesting to me, and shows (quite clearly to me) the social nature of gender and how it is and was constructed. Post industrial revolution until very recently (the last 50 years) it was considered the "man's job" to be the breadwinner - the sole provider for the household. This was, in part, the message sold to men to give them a special status within capitalism - prior to capitalism (and for the most poor and underprivileged populations) both men and women having to work was common. By shifting the spaces in which "men" and "women" worked - the wage space for men and the house for women - it privileged men and reinforced a stricter gender and familial hierarchy.
So with footbinding in China, female genital mutilation, and say the village council (mir) system in Russia, hierarchy (or patriarchy to use a more precise word) wasn't so strict before capitalism?
Patriarchy within capitalism is different from patriarchy outside of capitalism, and it is also different between cultures. I didn't say that patriarchy came with capitalism, just that capitalism changed gender roles and pushed women out of the sphere of waged work and into the sphere of household work - with the industrial revolution introducing in many ways the very concept of wage work, working hours, etc.
Where peasants would work to grow crops and manage lands that they were heavily taxed on by the lord, workers suddenly were working in factories and on production lines, and had to buy the goods that they needed to live from their wages. Where part of the daily labour of peasantry was producing and managing the spaces that also helped you live - be that cooking, cleaning, growing, hunting etc. - this got separated when women had less access to factory working (again, not all women, but as a population) and so it became women's work to manage the house whilst the men earned a wage.
This may be wishful thinking, but I really think we could see 4-5 Green MPs in the next parliament that pick off some of the most left wing typically Labour seats.
No 'may be' about it. If they win one seat they've had a fantastic night.
A more interesting question is, what if they peel off votes to Labour's left and allow the Tories to hold seats that might otherwise be lost?
I'm not convinced by that reasoning (I think if you're mad enough to vote Green in a Tory/Labour marginal you'd have abstained if they didn't stand) but fear of it was one factor in Corbyn's election (see here for @NickPalmer stating it was one reason he voted for him).
There would be a JPF/PFJ vibe to such a scenario, but considering the Brexit party may have saved Labour double-digit numbers of seats last time there would be karma to it.
There may well be more to this story than a small number of influential males in central London enjoying all-male company every so often in their lives - and paying to have access to all-male spaces where doubtless the snowflakes feel ever so safe and cosy.
It's already more than just about lawyers.
Not sure what has happened to the quotes there but I didn't actually say what you have me saying. I did, however, agree with it. And you make a valid point. These senior silks were members of the Garrick because of the contacts it gave them and the boost that gave to their prospects of being appointed. That is not a good thing.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
You could strip the duty away from fuel and add on the difference (In the round) set during the MOT which accounts for
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor 2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
Should be the 4th power of axle weight times the number of axles [which is proportional to road wear].
Though that might see VW releasing a 10 wheeled Golf...
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
It brings in less as usage drops, but until the government finds a replacement source (and all the suggestions to date have been controversial) the maths would suggest they should really be increasing fuel duty rates to compensate, rather than holding them down. But they cannot do that politically.
And petrol prices are, in cash terms, still at the level of about 12 years ago, low 140s around my way.
Which is far too high for what it is.
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Given car ownership correlates closely with income (and age), it's a highly progressive tax. Difficult to replace equitably.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
Road pricing is the obvious way to go as we move to electric vehicles.
You could strip the duty away from fuel and add on the difference (In the round) set during the MOT which accounts for
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor 2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
Should be the 4th power of axle weight times the number of axles [which is proportional to road wear].
Though that might see VW releasing a 10 wheeled Golf...
I thought about that but vehicle tax on lorries would have to go up to about 10 grand a vehicle which would add to food inflation ?
Surprising that it is still legal for any organisation to refuse membership on the basis of gender.
You'd ban the Women's Institute ?
Quite. I'd be wary of banning such clubs and societies. Recently at the level of cricket that my ageing body aspires to, we have seen more and more girls and women playing in men's teams (they were never actually mens teams, but in practice that has been the situation for hundreds of years at club level. On the one hand its great - spreading the love of the greatest game etc. On another level - one of the reasons for still playing at 51 is the banter with your mates. And with women there its different. Not worse necessarily, and don't get the impression of old misogenistic dinosaurs, but its different.
I believe that a group of men have the right to form a club that excludes women. I believe that a group of women have the right to form a club that excludes men.
Thats equality.
I agree entirely with this. I think this bullying of the Garrick is deeply unpleasant. It’s a private institution not a state run organisation and as such it can do what it likes if it complies with the law. I will grant that there is a unique issue with the Garrick in that so many senior male members of the legal profession are members. The sensible response would be for all of the other senior legal people to join another Club. I’m sure the Reform would be pleased to take them.
Apropos of nothing I gave up my membership of one male only Club because I usually go out of an evening with mixed groups so it was extremely awkward to use.
Nick Ferrari decides to lead on the people we really should be sorry for: those who would have to pay VAT on their private school fees.
I went to two private schools. The idea VAT shouldn't be paid is absurd.
Well, it's not, because introducing VAT for private schools is going to lead to worse outcomes. It will be revenue negative: it will cost more (in having to fund the state school places of kids who would have previously gone private) than it raises. And to take a very self-interested view: it will be harder for my youngest to get into the (state) senior school her sisters attend because there will be more parents seeking state school places.
It seems curiously self-destructive to implement a policy you see as logical which will harm many and benefit no-one. I'd happily stick with an illogical position over a bad position.
VAT on school fees is a policy that polls well and that's why Labour have it.
The evidence such as it is the policy will raise more revenue than the additional cost to the state sector to educate students of parents who can no longer afford the fees. Albeit it may not raise that much net revenue.
The policy is unique in ticking all the following:
Polls well with target voters Appeals to the left Easy to implement Revenue neutral to positive
Political gold dust.
Yes, it doesn't raise that much in the grand scheme of things but it's excellent PR. When it comes to the spectacle of a handful of sobbing upper middle class parents being forced to send their Oscars and Jemimas to Dumpsville Comp, there's no violin in the world small enough.
Be the making of them!
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
True poshos should be in favour of the policy.
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
It will disincentivise something which is harmful to society. That it won't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing. That would be to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
I jest, but I don't think you need to be a paid-up member of the signet ring and red trousers crowd to figure (or, more likely these days, one of the uber-rich international oligarch types who, like the grey squirrel, are slowly usurping our home-grown posh types) to figure out what this policy does.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
I don't think the class privilege reinforced by the likes of Eton is mitigated by a few more middle class parents using lower tier private schools.
Of course it's right to say this policy is no silver bullet for that either. There's no quick and easy way to fix something so deeply embedded.
What about by councils using private schools for children with EHCPs, now at over 50% of the intake in some schools?
This might be mitigated of course by councils taking such schools over. But they're very resistant to doing so. Taxpayers and the DfE both get very stuffy about it.
Interesting. So councils pay the private school fees for those children? Does that work on a VFM basis as compared to provision in the state sector?
There may well be more to this story than a small number of influential males in central London enjoying all-male company every so often in their lives - and paying to have access to all-male spaces where doubtless the snowflakes feel ever so safe and cosy.
It's already more than just about lawyers.
Not sure what has happened to the quotes there but I didn't actually say what you have me saying. I did, however, agree with it. And you make a valid point. These senior silks were members of the Garrick because of the contacts it gave them and the boost that gave to their prospects of being appointed. That is not a good thing.
Apologies for messing up the quotes. I'm not sure what happened.
Agreed - it's all about contacts. Exclusivity doesn't pinpoint what these institutions are about.
Comments
Bear in mind the tidal lagoons have a minimum lifespan of 120 years - probably much longer. There are sea-walls around the country built in the early 19th century which are still sound as a pound. The technology to build them with greater resilience is greater now than then.
But say it is just 150 years. During the life of the lagoon, you will need to replace solar capacity (at best) after 30 years, wind after 40 years, nuclear after 60 (if they ever last that long. Which means to compare apples with apples, you need to be on your fifth set of solar, your fourth set of wind turbines and your third nuclear plant. We are already seeing that with each new set, higher electricity prices are being demanded to justify that installation. Hinkley C is costing £50 billion. Hinkley D, what £75 billion? Hinkley E, what £125 billion? All stacking up against a tidal lagoon that produces an IDENTICAL amount of power at a build cost of £12 billion, with some new turbines in 60 years (say another £6 billion) and in 120 years (say £10 billion). So nuclear security of supply for 150 years of £250 billion versus tidal of £28 billion.
For ten plants, that is £2.5 trillion versus £280 billion.
Go figure why they haven't been built.
Mr. S, fuel duty matters less all the time, though, as electric vehicles rise.
They have plenty of other targets now (given the Tory meltdown and consequent prospect of a huge landslide) but winning back the Red Wall remains first and foremost. It's the sine qua non of a Labour GE victory.
There are other policies that would achieve this double of appealing to both the left and the Red Wall - eg nationalizing various things - but they are all either expensive or hard to implement. This one is neither. It's very doable.
£600 a shift is a lot of money but represents the fare of the first 2 of tables on the first train the driver is taking north / south.
That’s why train drivers earn so much, even if you pay them a lot the actual cost per passenger is about 20p per passenger per shift
A sane design would assume regular replacement and build in the ability to raise individual turbines to the surface and remove them easily.
IIRC one design had the turbines in ISO container sized boxing, and the associated generator the same. So shipping replacement/repair work would be easy.
The pensioners' union is only going to get more and more important as a voting bloc as our population continues to age. Working age people simply won't have the numbers to influence policy anymore. It's marginal already.
The only fix I can see is a big bang package of reform, that contains both costs and benefits. For example a one-time significant uprating of the OAP, by something like 10 or 15%, accompanied by a further increase in the pensionable age (or perhaps a stepped phasing in of the pension to encourage people to work part time for longer), and an abandonment of the triple lock in favour of increases linked to only one variable.
But it's not going to power Europe - or even the whole of the UK.
(And nuclear can, of course, be built more cheaply than we're doing - as a number of recent S Korean export orders have demonstrated.)
I was talking about the politics of it but I do happen to approve of the policy too. In general I'd say a person will like this policy if they consider the overall impact of private schools on our society to be negative. If they don't, they won't.
I don't pretend that wind is perfect, no source of electricity is, but it can play a role and British electricity supplies will be cheaper and more reliable with it as part of the mix than without.
You seem to be of the opinion that it is 100% useless, as an article of faith, and will swallow any old rubbish that accords with that preconceived view.
And what's worse is that you aren't interested in any exploration of the issue, any discussion or alternative views or evidence. Your mind is completely closed, and so that makes any interaction with you that most terrible thing.
Boring.
Even with October 1987 levels of forecasting skill the impact on wind generation estimates would have been pretty limited.
I know of what I speak!
It puts a private education at a second-rate no-name day school well and truly out of the reach of those despicable middle class oiks with airs and graces, and ensures only the truly well-heeled who can afford to send their offspring to one of the great public schools without a moment's thought about the cost will benefit from a private education.
It creates even more division in society between the elite public school educated at the top and the rest...
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/marine/edf-retrofits-worlds-first-tidal-power-station/
There is a contradiction in the policy though. To be successful state education has to be seen as inferior to private by a bigger margin than before.
Wind probably doesn't answer the first, certainly not by itself. But substituting gas for wind on windy days is a pretty decent incremental step for the second.
later, but the turbines have proven very well protected against corrosion and wear.
https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/La_Rance_Tidal_Power_Plant_40_year_operation_feedback.pdf
Elsewhere, 4x1.4GW for $20bn.
https://m-en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20240324000800320
Fuel duty isn't just being frozen, it's being abolished long term.
The Treasury got addicted to fleecing drivers for billions of pounds per annum, it still does but it won't be able to via fuel duty before long.
So it makes sense if that easy golden goose is being removed in the long term that the Treasury should detox slowly in finding alternative revenue sources rather than suddenly finding a huge black hole that needs filling due to mismanagement.
But I'm not a true posho so this doesn't speak to your point. My hunch is most true poshos would not support the policy but I could be wrong. Do we have any here who could comment?
The fact that they were even worse in real terms 12 years ago is no excuse, but the Treasury needs to be diversifying it's revenue and sourcing it from the general public equitably and not fleecing drivers.
Calls to destroy the BBC will go into overdrive after it highlights the Tories hypocrisy on immigration .
BREAKING: Boeing chair Larry Kellner and CEO Dave Calhoun to step down
My priority, as well as the small matter of saving the planet by reducing the burning of carbon based fuels to an absolute minimum, is, as usual, our balance of payments. I want us to be a net exporter of energy. If we use the resources available to us, both in terms of wind and tidal, we can achieve that. And reduce our import bill at the same time. We have made excellent progress on wind with more to come over the next year but we really, really need to get on with tidal as well.
Nuclear suffers both from being highly inflexible (it can't easily be switched off) and having very high baseload costs. No-one has ever managed to make the business case stack up. But one station can generate huge amounts of electricity.
At least four judges resign from men-only Garrick Club after backlash
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/25/judges-resign-from-men-only-garrick-club
They could double the price - but that would simply make the student body 100% mega rich plus scholarships.
They have concerns about the resulting social structure in the school, which they reckon would have a negative outcome in the medium term.
As it is, they are at 20% of 100% equivalent scholarships. That is, the scholarship funding is equivalent to 20% of places fully funded, but is spread more than that.
30 million EVs on the road at 60 kWh average size is distributed 1.8 terrawatt hours.
When we have too much wind, just charge your vehicle for cheap. Problem solved.
Otherwise, as Macquarie has frequently demonstrated, the income from them goes overseas. Along with capital extracted, in exchange for debt.
If the business is badly managed, it should go bust, its assets sold to a new utility firm at pennies on the pound and any bondholders and shareholders should be wiped out.
We're far too fragile about letting companies fail. Companies failing is part of a healthy free market, those who failed to do due diligence should get burnt not the consumers.
The parents who won't be able to afford a 20% increase will be the firmly lower-to-middle middle classes, in mid-level middle class jobs, who live in new builds in the dreary suburbs and spend a disproportionate part of their incomes on doing what they think is right for their kids, giving them the best possible education, probably sacrificing other things to do so - foreign holidays, new car every three years, etc. This will put private education, almost certainly at one of the "lesser" day schools out of their reach, putting a lot of those lesser schools out of business, too (note how many of the no-name day schools went out of business post 2008 after the GFC).
What you'll be left with is a bifurcated system, where those for whom educating their children privately isn't a struggle will continue to send their kids to Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Stowe, etc. Which is probably what most people think of when they think of approvingly about this kind of red-meat, eat-the-rich policy. They won't stop or change their behaviour at all. Unlike the dreary middle class yobbos I've mentioned above, who will probably end up spending the money on a house in a better catchment area (nice side effect there, rising house prices, got to keep that scam going) and after-hours private tuition to make sure their kids can still get into a good uni.
Net result is you'll have a smaller, more elite group of people who went to private schools, with all the advantages that confers. The sort of people for whom private education is a kind of veblen good, where the more expensive it is, and more out of reach of the ordinaries, the better it is.
The short of it is, the unintended consequence of this policy will be to make private school education even more of an elitist thing, and it won't hurt the really rich who can afford to send their kids to the major schools - which is what most people think of when they think of private school types - a jot. They are buying into a network and that's what matters to them. The middle class parents who are sacrificing expenditure in one area to buy their kids a better start in life will be the ones most affected.
It's all happening.
Could there soon be a day like 21 May 1981 in Italy? (Joke!)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/25/judges-resign-from-men-only-garrick-club
https://x.com/ukonward/status/1614229218799263745?s=20
And a good thread from Francois Valentin discussing it
https://x.com/Valen10Francois/status/1614649481655455745?s=20
The link with politics and affiliation is really strong. The less trusting the area, the more likely to vote for radical parties. And you can pretty much map the most trusting locations to Lib Dem seats or targets.
I'd replace it entirely with congestion/urban taxation, linked to the value and/or weight of the vehicle. That would retain the progressive nature of fuel duty, transform it into a Pigou tax, as well as give people who live in rural areas (the 20%) much cheaper fuel.
How much this policy will raise on that basis as against the extra cost to the state elsewhere is questionable.
Hence why my idea was to disendow the public schools.
Which I suspect is why Labour feel confident about this policy in a way did not 20-30 years ago - the aspirational middle classes already feel cut off private schooling as an educational choice. So are much happier to see those who can make it taxed on it, as do see as bestowing an unfair advantage on the wealthy rather than something can reasonably aspire to with next year's pay rise or some cutting back.
1) Mileage during the year (The MOT defines this) * a CO2 factor
2) Kerb weight * mileage.
That would better account for road wear and carbon emissions tbh.
Foreign vehicles would submit odometer checks on and off the ferry, as could anyone doing European motoring so they're not taxed twice.
That's not the world we live in, and never will be.
In the modern era, for good reasons (equity) and bad (capitalism needing growth and more workers), with women in the workplace being normalised (if not equalised) you have a problem - society still teaches men they are supposed to be the breadwinner, and men still internalise that, but it is almost impossible to live that life (unless you already come from wealth). This has a tendency to mean men (as a population, not every man) are more likely to have resentful feelings towards the economic situation as a whole, and in times of economic hardship (which I would argue we've been in since 2008) more so.
The outcomes of this environment mean men (again, as a population, not every individual man), who have been taught that they should be able to provide for their family and be strong, are affected by this in negative ways (the higher depression and suicide rates amongst working age men, why men are more likely to commit crimes than women, etc.) and leads to men wanting to feel secure via culturally reactive methods that reinstate the old status quo of male supremacy over the household.
The number is a lot more than four.
..The four judges were among dozens in the legal profession now known to have been members. Their number included a further four appeal court judges, five more high court judges, dozens of serving and retired judges, current and former ministers in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and numerous senior solicitors...
The shortfall has largely been met by immigrant families who really value education. I think that you are overstating it to say that the scrimpers and savers do not still pay a significant role. Whether they give up the fight after the imposition of VAT (and, at least in Scotland, significantly higher rates bills than hitherto) remains to be seen but DHS has recently had 2 waves of redundancies. I really don't see how this improves the prospects for UK plc.
Of course it's right to say this policy is no silver bullet for that either. There's no quick and easy way to fix something so deeply embedded.
The stable door was shut, but *not bolted*.
Remember when the WI gave Blair the clap?
No women will join anyway, but the Guardian won’t have anything to moan about
For the avoidance of doubt women are people too.
On the one hand its great - spreading the love of the greatest game etc. On another level - one of the reasons for still playing at 51 is the banter with your mates. And with women there its different. Not worse necessarily, and don't get the impression of old misogenistic dinosaurs, but its different.
I believe that a group of men have the right to form a club that excludes women.
I believe that a group of women have the right to form a club that excludes men.
Thats equality.
This might be mitigated of course by councils taking such schools over. But they're very resistant to doing so. Taxpayers and the DfE both get very stuffy about it.
Poor drivers spend a far higher proportion of their income on fuel than well off drivers do.
And poorer drivers currently tend to have less efficient vehicles too.
There's no need to replace it with tax on driving, driving should be no more heavily taxed than rail use or any other transportation.
I say this because the Green target seats like Bristol West (the only one I've canvassed for) are in areas where a) the Tories will never win and b) Labour centrism isn't appreciated by the core voters. I remember door knocking in Bristol at the last GE and heard many on the door say "Thangham's okay, but I'm really voting for Corbyn". Those voters are easy pick ups for the Greens, who are already doing well in local elections in these areas as well.
This may be wishful thinking, but I really think we could see 4-5 Green MPs in the next parliament that pick off some of the most left wing typically Labour seats. I doubt that would actually worry SKS that much, but (in my mind) it would change the nature of the parties - with Labour taking the spot of One Nation / Cameroon Toryism, Reform taking up the right flank, the LDs taking up the centre / left and the Greens being the clear left party. I do not see how the Tory party survives without it merging with Reform - and at this point it is possible that the Tory brand is worse regarded and therefore will die.
Thirdly grandson-in-law left to go the Kings Cross, on a casually available electric bike, which granddaughter assured us were readily available on an app, and which, she also assured us, were an excellent way for her and her friends to get about London. She told us she was looking forward to them being available in the Yorkshire city where they live.
In America utility firms go bust quite regularly, their shareholders and bondholders get burnt but the firm enters and exits bankruptcy protection and the customers don't pay the price, the shareholders and bondholders do as they should do.
Sadly here we bailout the bondholders most especially if not the shareholders, rather than letting them take full responsibility for their own actions. That's a political choice, not a law of the markets.
Though that might see VW releasing a 10 wheeled Golf...
If you are genuinely wealthy then wading through all the crud to identify what's actually worth your time must feel like hard work. But, nonetheless, it's a nice problem to have.
It's already more than just about lawyers.
But that’s where it ends
Peace was more important for women, prosperity more important for men. When Reagan campaigned for a more confrontational approach to the "evil empire", he did better among men. And the gap that opened then has continued ever since, hitting a maximum during Trump's two runs.
There are other reasons for the gap, of course. Without going into details, I can say that men and women disagree far more than they once did on how men and women should relate to each other. One can see some of the reasons for that disagreement in the popularity of two influential magazines, Ms. and Playboy. (By the way, Playboy was ahead of many feminists in backing legalized abortion -- for obvious reasons.)
(I see no obvous solutions to that disagreement, which has done so much damage to the US in recent decades.)
Where peasants would work to grow crops and manage lands that they were heavily taxed on by the lord, workers suddenly were working in factories and on production lines, and had to buy the goods that they needed to live from their wages. Where part of the daily labour of peasantry was producing and managing the spaces that also helped you live - be that cooking, cleaning, growing, hunting etc. - this got separated when women had less access to factory working (again, not all women, but as a population) and so it became women's work to manage the house whilst the men earned a wage.
A more interesting question is, what if they peel off votes to Labour's left and allow the Tories to hold seats that might otherwise be lost?
I'm not convinced by that reasoning (I think if you're mad enough to vote Green in a Tory/Labour marginal you'd have abstained if they didn't stand) but fear of it was one factor in Corbyn's election (see here for @NickPalmer stating it was one reason he voted for him).
There would be a JPF/PFJ vibe to such a scenario, but considering the Brexit party may have saved Labour double-digit numbers of seats last time there would be karma to it.
Apropos of nothing I gave up my membership of one male only Club because I usually go out of an evening with mixed groups so it was extremely awkward to use.
Agreed - it's all about contacts. Exclusivity doesn't pinpoint what these institutions are about.