Campbell is right. You see it on here, with lefties luxuriating in their silly protest votes for minor parties thinking that it 'will send a message'. It won't send any sort of message. It will be ignored. That's the problem with protest votes in FPP, no fucker ever notices them, they are just wasted votes, pure and simple.
I just don't believe there will be a Labour landslide to be honest. Just doesn't feel right. We'll know in two weeks whether the polling industry has a massive problem with DKs and very last minute switchers-back.
As I said the other day, unlikely though it is, I am going to laugh so much if Starmer does a TMay and turns predictions of a landslide into a lame duck minority administration. I will chuckle for weeks. Unlikely, admittedly, but it is an appealing thought. It would be the best thing in political news since Boris Johnson was defenestrated.
Given that they have to get a swing going on for the size of blairs in 1997 to get a majority, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
I still hold that the best result for the country generally, is a Labour administration with a very small majority.
Yes because we have never seen governments with very small majorities having to do ridiculous side deals with fringe interests and get bogged down in managing party rather than country. Never happened before, why would it this time?
Yes, and we have never seen parties with large majorities running roughshod over communities that they don't consider to be their voters either have we? Duh!
I can believe that poll in Herefordshire. When I was there last year the sewage in the Wye was - and surely still is - a massive issue for everyone. The Tories are despised for “letting it happen”. One of Britain’s most beautiful rivers ruined by effluent from chicken farms. Horrible
Makes sense that the Greens will benefit
I would be interested to see polling for Hereford and South Herefordshire. Jesse Norman doesn't seem to be making as much effort as I remember from last time. And just like Bill Wiggin in North Herefordshire, he has been taking a lot of stick about chicken effluent in the Wye.
Would be nice to start getting turnout back to 70% but it's hard to see it at this election with so many Con voters refusing to turn out.
Bit difficult, not having Plaid to vote for in most places.
Seriously, though, HYUFD did have a good point in doing his voting duty (though IMV tactically mistaken: I myself don't use my whole suite of votes if I really don't like some candidates: but that is a different matter). Shame to see so many Conservatives not doing their democratic duty.
I do. I always find a way to prefer one low-ranked candidate over another. Con > Reform, Reform > BNP, and so on. It's no endorsement of them. I just want to avoid the (incredibly unlikely) chance that if I'd used my preference I'd have put Reform in instead of a Nazi, or Con in instead of Farage, and so on. And it only costs a few seconds of your time.
Thanks. OTOH it does give them a positive credit which would not otherwise have happened ... say Con wins over Green (or whatever) as a result.
Those Green polls are something. As ever with constituency polling the smart money bets against the people piling in to follow the poll.
In this case though it’s possible they could create their own momentum (with a small m). There’s a fun novelty factor about being in a constituency with an unusual party that cuts across the usual partisan divide. I could imagine people of all stripes thinking “what fun, let’s have a green MP!”
My theory is this is the nascent rebirth of the next successful iteration of the Conservative party, after it eventually has had enough of fantasist populist nationalism.
I agree.
But I suspect it will take them into Labour’s second term before they begin to come to their senses on that.
Building more roads produces more congestion. This has been proven over and over again.
And building more phone masts just creates more internet traffic.
Yes, that's evidently true. But unlike roads, internet access is an actual societal leveller and is the biggest/cheapest levelling up policy we could do.
So no I don't think it bad to want to have 100% 5G coverage and to reform planning to have them built. Would you rather I didn't comment on things I know about?
Campbell is right. You see it on here, with lefties luxuriating in their silly protest votes for minor parties thinking that it 'will send a message'. It won't send any sort of message. It will be ignored. That's the problem with protest votes in FPP, no fucker ever notices them, they are just wasted votes, pure and simple.
I just don't believe there will be a Labour landslide to be honest. Just doesn't feel right. We'll know in two weeks whether the polling industry has a massive problem with DKs and very last minute switchers-back.
As I said the other day, unlikely though it is, I am going to laugh so much if Starmer does a TMay and turns predictions of a landslide into a lame duck minority administration. I will chuckle for weeks. Unlikely, admittedly, but it is an appealing thought. It would be the best thing in political news since Boris Johnson was defenestrated.
Given that they have to get a swing going on for the size of blairs in 1997 to get a majority, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
I still hold that the best result for the country generally, is a Labour administration with a very small majority.
Yes because we have never seen governments with very small majorities having to do ridiculous side deals with fringe interests and get bogged down in managing party rather than country. Never happened before, why would it this time?
Yes, and we have never seen parties with large majorities running roughshod over communities that they don't consider to be their voters either have we? Duh!
I'd put the chances of a party with a big majority getting a "Good" rating from me at about 35-45% against one with a small majority at 10-20%.
Coalition can work, but small majorities are a nightmare for both getting things done and focusing on what needs doing.
I'm off for a picnic in the Chilterns with my eldest, to try and take her mind off her A Levels, which she thinks she has flunked.
She may not have, as from your description she seems like a good kid. But if she has, comfort her and impress on her that things like that at her age feel disastrous but are fixable: she can resit next year and given your wealth you can afford to support her while she does.
This appointed court is not a part of our constitution; it has no legitimacy, and it is effectively making up law. It needs to be binned.
Um no, it interprets the current law and generates a result.
The new Labour Government can change the law and fix the issue all the Supreme Court has done is combine the law as it currently is and come to (an admittedly unexpected) conclusion..
People like @Luckyguy1983 clearly have no understanding of our legal system whatsoever. This is how it has ALWAYS worked.
Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities. It is a complete abuse of "supreme court" powers to intervene on these spurious grounds, effectively to prevent any new oil wells being built in this country - economical self-harm which is for elected parliamentarians to inflict if they so wish, because they can be de-elected again. It's not for an appointed body to stretch its remit and make decisions like this.
They can intervene if the process was not followed properly. That’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law.
Their judgement is based upon a highly troubling interpretation of what that process should be - that's the point. The emissions involved in the set up and ongoing operation of the business were reported on in the usual way. The emissions generated subsequently were not, and I've explained why to demand that they are is deeply concerning in other posts.
I worry that this bit of the above… : “ Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities”
…Shows a confusion between parliament and the executive.
Parliament makes laws. The executive (Government or SCC) makes decisions which should be legal, but if there is doubt the Judicial system will decide
This is part of the citizenship exam. Maybe it should be taught in schools too?
That's true but the court made a mistake in its ruling.
The emissions generated by the burning of the oil should not be counted as the net difference of oil burnt as a result of the well is zero.
Why zero? Because oil is fungible and had we not extracted from this well we'd have just imported from Saudi Arabia or somewhere else the exact same amount of oil.
So the total net emissions of a fungible product is zero, unless or until we start forbidding imports.
As pointed out by someone previously, the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the issue, but only on whether the county council had considered the substance of the issue. Which they had not.
So your objection is not relevant, or in order, and we could expect that a revised planning decision from the country council, which did consider the substance of the issue, has a high probability of concluding that it shouldn't be a bar to approving the application, for the logical reasons you set out.
That outcome would be law followed, planning approved, everyone happy (especially the lawyers!)
Not the locals. Not people who care about the countryside. Not those who want to save the planet.
but, yeah, it was about legal processes at the moment
I want to save the planet.
To do that we need to follow science, not dogma.
The science is we need to transition away from consuming oil.
We still need oil for the transition though and there is no scientific reason why OPEC-produced oil is better for the environment than domestically produced oil.
If the world needs to transition away from consuming oil, then basic logic says that the world also has to transition away from producing oil. As a country, we should therefore transition away from both producing and consuming oil as well as appropriately taxing the import of oil and oil derivatives to encourage other countries to do likewise.
No. We should maximise oil production in democratic states in order to minimise the flow of cash to despots and dictators. As long as we need it, the "west" should produce it.
This.
Regdrding renewables. The economic arguments for wind turbines etc. are barking. They have to be backed 100% by conventional power stations (gas) to cover still windless dark cold periods.
The eco argument is equally ludicrous and industry destroying with higher costs when China and India etc extracting vast amounts of coal for cheap electricity.
There is an argument for it on security reasons, with our own oil running out thenturbines mean we need less gas/oil from Vladimir and Khassogis murderers.
But pointing that out would mean the politicians saying "we've cocked up energy policy, ours is running out and we've got to spend a fortune otherwise Vlad and Sundry Sheiks will have us over a barrel"
Far better to say "you wicked people, you are destroying the planet, we must go green to save it"
The downside of that is that the green zealots are as uncontrollable and destructive as any other zealot and they have been allowed within the citadel.
oh, ffs.
The anti wind argument again.
We should be moving toward a mixed energy source system, which for the majority of time would mean most of our energy being provided by wind/solar. In these times only a small amount is fossil fuel based. EG now we have 15GW wind/solar and 5GW gas fired. Sometimes that mix needs to change obviously, but overall the use of wind/solar reduces our need for gas on average.
The anti-renewables loons are Putin's little shills.
As well as being a big exporter of fossil fuels, Russia is one of the few countries that is likely to benefit from anthropogenic climate change, so it's in their interests to deter moves away from fossil fuel consumption. It is also in their interest for those countries with small reserves to squander them as quickly as possible on fuel production so that they will be dependent on countries like Russia for raw materials for plastics, etc, in the future.
There seems to be no shortage of useful idiots, especially on the right of the political spectrum.
Many of the rewnewables-or-nothing loons, like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, are Putin's little shills as well. He knows we will keep on buying fossil fuels for the immediate future, but the arguments between the anti-renewables and environmental extremists suit him, as they are very disruptive.
As for your last line: I might suggest that Just Stop Oil's behaviour over the last few days shows the useful idiots are also on the left of the political spectrum as well.
So you also believe that we should extract every last drop of UK oil as quickly as possible, thus leaving us at the mercy of Russia and Saudi Arabia in the future when it's all gone?
No.
It's a matter of progress. We need to move towards green energy - and we've been doing that really, really fast (*). But there is a limit to the speed by which we can do that without ruining the economy, and major technological hurdles remain (social ones as well, but less so).
Whilst this is in progress and we need oil and gas, we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Whilst also going great guns towards both reducing the need for oil and gas, and also being greener.
The alternate view involves us buying the oil and gas we need from those very regimes you named. Except not in some hypothetical future, but right now.
(*) It is a crying shame that so many so-called environmentalists ignore this.
That view epitomises short-term thinking. We know that our reserves of fossil fuels are small compared to those of Russia, etc, and we also know that we will need a certain amount of fossil fuel for essential purposes for an indefinite period. Given those two facts, it makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now. It's asking for trouble in the future.
As for going great guns, no. While we, as a planet, have made some progress towards reducing emissions, it has been pitifully slow, to the extent that there has thus far been no noticeable effect on the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is still accelerating. We are applauding our efforts while losing the war.
No. My view epitomises both long-term and short-term thinking. What we need to do now, to get where we need to be in the future. You just want to give as much money as possible to bad/evil regimes now. Regimes who have no reason to advance a green future. Gradatim ferociter, as a certain billionaire might say.
" makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now."
Gas and oil is used for essential purposes now. Even on a sunny day with some wind, gas is providing us with some power. Petrol and diesel is allowing most of us to get around. And you think that is non-essential?
As for your last paragraph: we as a country have been going great guns. The world might not have been, but it's crass to deny how much progress our country has made over the last two decades.
When I look at of my window at all the single-occupant tonka-truck SUVs driving past my house, it's pretty hard to believe that we are using all that oil for essential purposes. Ditto the tourist-filled jets flying overhead.
You have zero idea why people are making those journeys. Zero. They may not seem essential to you; but can I judge your lifestyle too, please?
Now you're just being ridiculous. You're effectively claiming that every journey made is essential. Even if that were the case, it is certainly not essential that it be made in a gas-guzzling SUV. And you have the gall to call me a Putin apologist? Just take a look at yourself.
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
We clearly have very different understandings of the meaning of the word "essential".
Clearly.
Name a single journey you could eliminate which wouldn't harm anyone's economic, mental or physical health or wellbeing.
For lots of people in office jobs, the commute.
No thanks. I went back to the office (with permission) towards the end of one of the lockdowns (can't remember which one) as working at home was driving me crazy.
I don't like WFH either, but it was a great opportunity to increase productivity (gain all those hours back commuting) and spread housing demand more evenly around the country.
Just imagine if we had used increased home working as a way of achieving levelling up. We could have spread work around the country and revitalised the high street in every town. City centres would have taken a hit, but the pandemic was the perfect cover for the transition.
Remember the laments on PB on how London would rot from the core outwards. And how too too awful it was for the property investors.
Remind me, have we had record rent increases in the whole country over the last year, or just in London?
Round here we rented a two bedroom house 23 years ago for £650 a month. You are looking at about £1000-1100 for something similar.
Inflation over that period takes £650 to £1183.
House I bought later that year now up over 300% in value.
Sorry but you have the current rates wrong. The cheapest 2 bed house to rent in Luton is £1200 a month and more likely £1300-1400 (source Rightmove search 30 seconds ago).
I don't live in Luton and where I do live there are 2 bed cluster houses on the market for £925
I believe that.
What I don't believe is that an equivalent 2 bed cluster house in the same location in 2001 cost £650 pcm.
It wasn't a cluster house, it was a "proper" 2 bed semi with a garden.
From (long) memory, cluster houses were about £450-500 pcm then.
"What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British)"
"If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad If the country were a person, it would need its friends to sit it down and deliver it a few home truths about its damaging behaviour to itself and others, says Michael Peel"
You don’t have to spend too much time on history twitter so see stuff like this:
We are profoundly ignorant of our history, as a society. There was a survey doing the rounds around the D-Day anniversary the other week that said that supposedly half of the UK thought we had done the most, as a country, to win WW2.
I love my country, we have done wonderful things throughout history. But I wish we had a more grown up, nuanced understanding of our history and the things we have done, good and bad, and how that’s impacted other countries and peoples, for good or ill. That might help ameliorate the problems the column highlights.
I’m not holding my breath, the English, especially the elites, do so love their self-bestowed exceptionalism.
There is an argument for that. Had Hitler won the Battle of Britain he could have conquered Britain by late 1940 and captured Moscow by the end of summer 1941.
The Nazis could then have invaded the Eastern USA and Canada and the Japanese the Western USA and Australia, NZ and India
No that I've seen/read it, but isn't that akin to the plot of The Man In The High Castle?
Fatherland seems more plausible to me.
I'm interested in the logistics of Hitler invading the Eastern USA !
Especially given that it took 3 years for the British Empire / USA to build up the capability to invade France from the UK, and Hitler's matchbox navy. D-Day was 2.5 years after the explicit "Europe First" decision.
Even in 1938 the combined UK-British-Empire-USA economy was about 5x larger than that of Germany, and that disparity increased during the war.
This appointed court is not a part of our constitution; it has no legitimacy, and it is effectively making up law. It needs to be binned.
Um no, it interprets the current law and generates a result.
The new Labour Government can change the law and fix the issue all the Supreme Court has done is combine the law as it currently is and come to (an admittedly unexpected) conclusion..
People like @Luckyguy1983 clearly have no understanding of our legal system whatsoever. This is how it has ALWAYS worked.
Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities. It is a complete abuse of "supreme court" powers to intervene on these spurious grounds, effectively to prevent any new oil wells being built in this country - economical self-harm which is for elected parliamentarians to inflict if they so wish, because they can be de-elected again. It's not for an appointed body to stretch its remit and make decisions like this.
They can intervene if the process was not followed properly. That’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law.
Their judgement is based upon a highly troubling interpretation of what that process should be - that's the point. The emissions involved in the set up and ongoing operation of the business were reported on in the usual way. The emissions generated subsequently were not, and I've explained why to demand that they are is deeply concerning in other posts.
I worry that this bit of the above… : “ Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities”
…Shows a confusion between parliament and the executive.
Parliament makes laws. The executive (Government or SCC) makes decisions which should be legal, but if there is doubt the Judicial system will decide
This is part of the citizenship exam. Maybe it should be taught in schools too?
That's true but the court made a mistake in its ruling.
The emissions generated by the burning of the oil should not be counted as the net difference of oil burnt as a result of the well is zero.
Why zero? Because oil is fungible and had we not extracted from this well we'd have just imported from Saudi Arabia or somewhere else the exact same amount of oil.
So the total net emissions of a fungible product is zero, unless or until we start forbidding imports.
As pointed out by someone previously, the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the issue, but only on whether the county council had considered the substance of the issue. Which they had not.
So your objection is not relevant, or in order, and we could expect that a revised planning decision from the country council, which did consider the substance of the issue, has a high probability of concluding that it shouldn't be a bar to approving the application, for the logical reasons you set out.
That outcome would be law followed, planning approved, everyone happy (especially the lawyers!)
Not the locals. Not people who care about the countryside. Not those who want to save the planet.
but, yeah, it was about legal processes at the moment
I want to save the planet.
To do that we need to follow science, not dogma.
The science is we need to transition away from consuming oil.
We still need oil for the transition though and there is no scientific reason why OPEC-produced oil is better for the environment than domestically produced oil.
If the world needs to transition away from consuming oil, then basic logic says that the world also has to transition away from producing oil. As a country, we should therefore transition away from both producing and consuming oil as well as appropriately taxing the import of oil and oil derivatives to encourage other countries to do likewise.
No. We should maximise oil production in democratic states in order to minimise the flow of cash to despots and dictators. As long as we need it, the "west" should produce it.
This.
Regdrding renewables. The economic arguments for wind turbines etc. are barking. They have to be backed 100% by conventional power stations (gas) to cover still windless dark cold periods.
The eco argument is equally ludicrous and industry destroying with higher costs when China and India etc extracting vast amounts of coal for cheap electricity.
There is an argument for it on security reasons, with our own oil running out thenturbines mean we need less gas/oil from Vladimir and Khassogis murderers.
But pointing that out would mean the politicians saying "we've cocked up energy policy, ours is running out and we've got to spend a fortune otherwise Vlad and Sundry Sheiks will have us over a barrel"
Far better to say "you wicked people, you are destroying the planet, we must go green to save it"
The downside of that is that the green zealots are as uncontrollable and destructive as any other zealot and they have been allowed within the citadel.
oh, ffs.
The anti wind argument again.
We should be moving toward a mixed energy source system, which for the majority of time would mean most of our energy being provided by wind/solar. In these times only a small amount is fossil fuel based. EG now we have 15GW wind/solar and 5GW gas fired. Sometimes that mix needs to change obviously, but overall the use of wind/solar reduces our need for gas on average.
The anti-renewables loons are Putin's little shills.
As well as being a big exporter of fossil fuels, Russia is one of the few countries that is likely to benefit from anthropogenic climate change, so it's in their interests to deter moves away from fossil fuel consumption. It is also in their interest for those countries with small reserves to squander them as quickly as possible on fuel production so that they will be dependent on countries like Russia for raw materials for plastics, etc, in the future.
There seems to be no shortage of useful idiots, especially on the right of the political spectrum.
Many of the rewnewables-or-nothing loons, like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, are Putin's little shills as well. He knows we will keep on buying fossil fuels for the immediate future, but the arguments between the anti-renewables and environmental extremists suit him, as they are very disruptive.
As for your last line: I might suggest that Just Stop Oil's behaviour over the last few days shows the useful idiots are also on the left of the political spectrum as well.
So you also believe that we should extract every last drop of UK oil as quickly as possible, thus leaving us at the mercy of Russia and Saudi Arabia in the future when it's all gone?
No.
It's a matter of progress. We need to move towards green energy - and we've been doing that really, really fast (*). But there is a limit to the speed by which we can do that without ruining the economy, and major technological hurdles remain (social ones as well, but less so).
Whilst this is in progress and we need oil and gas, we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Whilst also going great guns towards both reducing the need for oil and gas, and also being greener.
The alternate view involves us buying the oil and gas we need from those very regimes you named. Except not in some hypothetical future, but right now.
(*) It is a crying shame that so many so-called environmentalists ignore this.
That view epitomises short-term thinking. We know that our reserves of fossil fuels are small compared to those of Russia, etc, and we also know that we will need a certain amount of fossil fuel for essential purposes for an indefinite period. Given those two facts, it makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now. It's asking for trouble in the future.
As for going great guns, no. While we, as a planet, have made some progress towards reducing emissions, it has been pitifully slow, to the extent that there has thus far been no noticeable effect on the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is still accelerating. We are applauding our efforts while losing the war.
No. My view epitomises both long-term and short-term thinking. What we need to do now, to get where we need to be in the future. You just want to give as much money as possible to bad/evil regimes now. Regimes who have no reason to advance a green future. Gradatim ferociter, as a certain billionaire might say.
" makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now."
Gas and oil is used for essential purposes now. Even on a sunny day with some wind, gas is providing us with some power. Petrol and diesel is allowing most of us to get around. And you think that is non-essential?
As for your last paragraph: we as a country have been going great guns. The world might not have been, but it's crass to deny how much progress our country has made over the last two decades.
When I look at of my window at all the single-occupant tonka-truck SUVs driving past my house, it's pretty hard to believe that we are using all that oil for essential purposes. Ditto the tourist-filled jets flying overhead.
You have zero idea why people are making those journeys. Zero. They may not seem essential to you; but can I judge your lifestyle too, please?
Now you're just being ridiculous. You're effectively claiming that every journey made is essential. Even if that were the case, it is certainly not essential that it be made in a gas-guzzling SUV. And you have the gall to call me a Putin apologist? Just take a look at yourself.
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
We clearly have very different understandings of the meaning of the word "essential".
Clearly.
Name a single journey you could eliminate which wouldn't harm anyone's economic, mental or physical health or wellbeing.
For lots of people in office jobs, the commute.
No thanks. I went back to the office (with permission) towards the end of one of the lockdowns (can't remember which one) as working at home was driving me crazy.
I don't like WFH either, but it was a great opportunity to increase productivity (gain all those hours back commuting) and spread housing demand more evenly around the country.
Just imagine if we had used increased home working as a way of achieving levelling up. We could have spread work around the country and revitalised the high street in every town. City centres would have taken a hit, but the pandemic was the perfect cover for the transition.
Remember the laments on PB on how London would rot from the core outwards. And how too too awful it was for the property investors.
Remind me, have we had record rent increases in the whole country over the last year, or just in London?
Round here we rented a two bedroom house 23 years ago for £650 a month. You are looking at about £1000-1100 for something similar.
Inflation over that period takes £650 to £1183.
House I bought later that year now up over 300% in value.
That doesn't strike me as plausible.
650 to 1100 in 23 years is about 2.3% p.a. rise. The data I've found on a quick search shows Bedford and the wider EoE running at about 4% since 2016, albeit fluctuating between +8 and -1%. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/housingpriceslocal/E06000055/ That would mean for the 15 years preceding that, rent inflation would have to be about 1.4% p.a. in order to get from 650 to 1100. I think there's something wrong with what you said, possibly a highly unrepresentative example.
Rents were virtually static for years. Only in recent years have prices risen significantly.
"What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British)"
"If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad If the country were a person, it would need its friends to sit it down and deliver it a few home truths about its damaging behaviour to itself and others, says Michael Peel"
You don’t have to spend too much time on history twitter so see stuff like this:
We are profoundly ignorant of our history, as a society. There was a survey doing the rounds around the D-Day anniversary the other week that said that supposedly half of the UK thought we had done the most, as a country, to win WW2.
I love my country, we have done wonderful things throughout history. But I wish we had a more grown up, nuanced understanding of our history and the things we have done, good and bad, and how that’s impacted other countries and peoples, for good or ill. That might help ameliorate the problems the column highlights.
I’m not holding my breath, the English, especially the elites, do so love their self-bestowed exceptionalism.
That dumb illustration (probably by some self-loathing lefty) could equally apply to the United States, France, Germany, China, Japan and definitely Russia. I am anti-nationalism, but my simple message to self-loathing lefties is if you don't like your country, then please fuck off and try living elsewhere.
I agree with what you say on Brexit, but everything else you post doesn’t float my boat.
I’d argue that a mature, grown-up understanding of our history would have helped to avoid the gigantic self-imposed clusterfuck that Brexit has brought. The ignorance of our place in the world, and what we’ve done for good and bad, feeds the exceptionalism and insular chauvinism that the Leave campaigns so skilfully, sadly, exploited.
But you feel free to splutter about self-loathing lefties if you wish.
Giving my age away, I had a teacher at my bog-standard comp who during the Falklands War used to refer to the Falklands as The Malvinas. This, along with arguing with many lefties that I met at university who seemed to admire the autocratic Soviet Union more than Britain, gave me a life long contempt for those on the hard left, and a pretty good understanding that these muppets seem to delight in assuming that any country was far superior to their own.
Brett Deveraux's Unmitigated Pedantry website is a joy to read. He's a left of centre, military historian, at North Carolina University.
I liked his point that the most brutal of all the European colonial empires was the one that lasted the longest, namely the USSR.
But, the Americans don't have much to crow about with their own expansion of the country and treatment of the natives.
Building more roads produces more congestion. This has been proven over and over again.
And building more phone masts just creates more internet traffic.
Yes, that's evidently true. But unlike roads, internet access is an actual societal leveller and is the biggest/cheapest levelling up policy we could do.
So no I don't think it bad to want to have 100% 5G coverage and to reform planning to have them built. Would you rather I didn't comment on things I know about?
Transportation is an actual leveller too and good too.
So what's bad about increasing transportation?
If there's extra transportation due to economic growth, then growth is a good thing, is it not?
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
Building more roads produces more congestion. This has been proven over and over again.
And building more phone masts just creates more internet traffic.
Yes, that's evidently true. But unlike roads, internet access is an actual societal leveller and is the biggest/cheapest levelling up policy we could do.
So no I don't think it bad to want to have 100% 5G coverage and to reform planning to have them built. Would you rather I didn't comment on things I know about?
I just think you're underestimating how essential cars are to people outside London.
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
Your definition of 'essential' appears to be one not found in any dictionary.
No matter how clean electric cars are we should not be encouraging more journeys. Going electric does not magically increase the capacity of the roads, it does not reduce parking problems, and it actually increases road maintenance costs. There's a strong (IMO) argument that more cars reduces overall mobility - if you doubled the number of cars on the road there would be gridlock, electric or not.
Actually improving ease of mobility for most people will involve a mix of better public transport, improved provision for cycling, increased use of light vehicles like motorcycles and scooters, and eventually hire-by-the-hour self driving electric cars.
In the village where I live traffic is often completely choked at busy times because far too many people get out their huge SUVs to go shopping. This in a place where you can literally walk from one end of the village to the other in 10 minutes. My neighbour always gets out her car to go shopping, even though we live a 3 minute walk from the shops. I can walk there, buy what I need and be home before she's even found a parking spot.
There needs to be an attitude change where cars are seen as a last resort when no other means of transport is suitable, or all of the current issues are just going to get worse.
"We should not be encouraging more journeys"
= everyone should just stay in their little corner of the world, like hermits.
"What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British)"
"If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad If the country were a person, it would need its friends to sit it down and deliver it a few home truths about its damaging behaviour to itself and others, says Michael Peel"
You don’t have to spend too much time on history twitter so see stuff like this:
We are profoundly ignorant of our history, as a society. There was a survey doing the rounds around the D-Day anniversary the other week that said that supposedly half of the UK thought we had done the most, as a country, to win WW2.
I love my country, we have done wonderful things throughout history. But I wish we had a more grown up, nuanced understanding of our history and the things we have done, good and bad, and how that’s impacted other countries and peoples, for good or ill. That might help ameliorate the problems the column highlights.
I’m not holding my breath, the English, especially the elites, do so love their self-bestowed exceptionalism.
There is an argument for that. Had Hitler won the Battle of Britain he could have conquered Britain by late 1940 and captured Moscow by the end of summer 1941.
The Nazis could then have invaded the Eastern USA and Canada and the Japanese the Western USA and Australia, NZ and India
No that I've seen/read it, but isn't that akin to the plot of The Man In The High Castle?
Fatherland seems more plausible to me.
I'm interested in the logistics of Hitler invading the Eastern USA !
Especially given that it took 3 years for the British Empire / USA to build up the capability to invade France from the UK, and Hitler's matchbox navy. D-Day was 2.5 years after the explicit "Europe First" decision.
Even in 1938 the combined UK-British-Empire-USA economy was about 5x larger than that of Germany, and that disparity increased during the war.
And I suspect they might have spotted them coming.
It’s easily 20 years since I read it, but I I think the alternate history of Man in the High Castle starts with FDR not getting his third term, no new deal, and a much longer depression. That makes the rest a bit more credible.
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
Your definition of 'essential' appears to be one not found in any dictionary.
No matter how clean electric cars are we should not be encouraging more journeys. Going electric does not magically increase the capacity of the roads, it does not reduce parking problems, and it actually increases road maintenance costs. There's a strong (IMO) argument that more cars reduces overall mobility - if you doubled the number of cars on the road there would be gridlock, electric or not.
Actually improving ease of mobility for most people will involve a mix of better public transport, improved provision for cycling, increased use of light vehicles like motorcycles and scooters, and eventually hire-by-the-hour self driving electric cars.
In the village where I live traffic is often completely choked at busy times because far too many people get out their huge SUVs to go shopping. This in a place where you can literally walk from one end of the village to the other in 10 minutes. My neighbour always gets out her car to go shopping, even though we live a 3 minute walk from the shops. I can walk there, buy what I need and be home before she's even found a parking spot.
There needs to be an attitude change where cars are seen as a last resort when no other means of transport is suitable, or all of the current issues are just going to get worse.
This is Noel Philips flying to Texas for a few hours in order to visit a steak restaurant, before flying back to the UK the same day.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
My position is that I would seriously consider voting for a Green as Local Councillor, but would need a *lot* of thought to do it in a national election.
But in Ashfield it's not very likely to be an opportunity .
TBF the Greens are the only party known to me with an ideological commitment to Active Travel based on values - for everybody else it is tactical.
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
Your definition of 'essential' appears to be one not found in any dictionary.
No matter how clean electric cars are we should not be encouraging more journeys. Going electric does not magically increase the capacity of the roads, it does not reduce parking problems, and it actually increases road maintenance costs. There's a strong (IMO) argument that more cars reduces overall mobility - if you doubled the number of cars on the road there would be gridlock, electric or not.
Actually improving ease of mobility for most people will involve a mix of better public transport, improved provision for cycling, increased use of light vehicles like motorcycles and scooters, and eventually hire-by-the-hour self driving electric cars.
In the village where I live traffic is often completely choked at busy times because far too many people get out their huge SUVs to go shopping. This in a place where you can literally walk from one end of the village to the other in 10 minutes. My neighbour always gets out her car to go shopping, even though we live a 3 minute walk from the shops. I can walk there, buy what I need and be home before she's even found a parking spot.
There needs to be an attitude change where cars are seen as a last resort when no other means of transport is suitable, or all of the current issues are just going to get worse.
Every journey everyone is making is of the utmost importance to them at the time they are making it. That is why they are making it, if it wasn't, they'd be doing something different.
As for capacity, build more roads, problem solved. Good for your neighbour for taking her car shopping with her, that means she can put the shopping into her car.
If there's not enough roads for the volume of cars, build more. Our road capacity hasn't kept up with our population growth in recent years so it is a major thing we need to invest in.
Yesterday evening, to mark the summer solstice, we drove to a viewpoint near the summit of a hill overlooking Bantry. I enjoyed the view, and, though the viewpoint is on the Sheep's Head walking trail, it wasn't practical for my wife to walk to the top instead of driving.
However, it's definitely a trip that I would classify as non-essential, but I disagree that frivolous journeys should necessarily be discouraged. Life is for fun as well as for necessity.
Lying well is undoubtedly a core skill of any senior police officer.
What's astonishing is how long he got away with such nonsense, given that his age was an immediate giveaway that he couldn't possibly have fought in the Falklands.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
So I am Labour, not Green, but I would self-identify as an eco-socialist. Environmental issues are more important to me than other areas of policy (e.g. housing), which often puts me at odds with fellow party members. My wife, who is a Green member, thinks my position is all very airy-fairy and pandering to the ill-informed masses. She also despairs at the Green Party for faffing about with stuff that is nothing to do with environmentalism. She is an out-and-out eco-authoritarian, believing that the values of the enlightened minority should be imposed on us all. While I have some sympathy with her position (holding a dim view of a big chunk of humankind), I hold democracy too dear to allow it to be overruled in this way.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
My position is that I would seriously consider voting for a Green as Local Councillor, but would need a *lot* of thought to do it in a national election.
But in Ashfield it's not very likely to be an opportunity .
TBF the Greens are the only party known to me with an ideological commitment to Active Travel based on values - for everybody else it is tactical.
Yes - and that's a really important reason for me too.
Environmentalism is not just about climate, far from it - and it should be reasonably left/right agnostic, or at least have ideological space to consider different solutions to the same acknowledged issues, whether that be active travel, shit in the rivers or the response to climate change. I want people who might otherwise vote Tory to be able consider voting Green without being put off by Trots banging on about Palestine.
@HYUFD thinks that this suggests a short honeymoon period for Keith however I think it’s also possible that people are “pleasantly surprised” and his approval may drastically increase post election. That’s if he’s any good of course.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
So I am Labour, not Green, but I would self-identify as an eco-socialist. Environmental issues are more important to me than other areas of policy (e.g. housing), which often puts me at odds with fellow party members. My wife, who is a Green member, thinks my position is all very airy-fairy and pandering to the ill-informed masses. She also despairs at the Green Party for faffing about with stuff that is nothing to do with environmentalism. She is an out-and-out eco-authoritarian, believing that the values of the enlightened minority should be imposed on us all. While I have some sympathy with her position (holding a dim view of a big chunk of humankind), I hold democracy too dear to allow it to be overruled in this way.
Tend more to your view as well, and am of an age where the fundamental rightness of democracy has crystallised in my brain to an extent that it can't be undone.
Like your wife though - I also despair at them faffing around with stuff that is off-brief.
This appointed court is not a part of our constitution; it has no legitimacy, and it is effectively making up law. It needs to be binned.
Um no, it interprets the current law and generates a result.
The new Labour Government can change the law and fix the issue all the Supreme Court has done is combine the law as it currently is and come to (an admittedly unexpected) conclusion..
People like @Luckyguy1983 clearly have no understanding of our legal system whatsoever. This is how it has ALWAYS worked.
Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities. It is a complete abuse of "supreme court" powers to intervene on these spurious grounds, effectively to prevent any new oil wells being built in this country - economical self-harm which is for elected parliamentarians to inflict if they so wish, because they can be de-elected again. It's not for an appointed body to stretch its remit and make decisions like this.
They can intervene if the process was not followed properly. That’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law.
Their judgement is based upon a highly troubling interpretation of what that process should be - that's the point. The emissions involved in the set up and ongoing operation of the business were reported on in the usual way. The emissions generated subsequently were not, and I've explained why to demand that they are is deeply concerning in other posts.
I worry that this bit of the above… : “ Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities”
…Shows a confusion between parliament and the executive.
Parliament makes laws. The executive (Government or SCC) makes decisions which should be legal, but if there is doubt the Judicial system will decide
This is part of the citizenship exam. Maybe it should be taught in schools too?
That's true but the court made a mistake in its ruling.
The emissions generated by the burning of the oil should not be counted as the net difference of oil burnt as a result of the well is zero.
Why zero? Because oil is fungible and had we not extracted from this well we'd have just imported from Saudi Arabia or somewhere else the exact same amount of oil.
So the total net emissions of a fungible product is zero, unless or until we start forbidding imports.
As pointed out by someone previously, the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the issue, but only on whether the county council had considered the substance of the issue. Which they had not.
So your objection is not relevant, or in order, and we could expect that a revised planning decision from the country council, which did consider the substance of the issue, has a high probability of concluding that it shouldn't be a bar to approving the application, for the logical reasons you set out.
That outcome would be law followed, planning approved, everyone happy (especially the lawyers!)
Not the locals. Not people who care about the countryside. Not those who want to save the planet.
but, yeah, it was about legal processes at the moment
I want to save the planet.
To do that we need to follow science, not dogma.
The science is we need to transition away from consuming oil.
We still need oil for the transition though and there is no scientific reason why OPEC-produced oil is better for the environment than domestically produced oil.
If the world needs to transition away from consuming oil, then basic logic says that the world also has to transition away from producing oil. As a country, we should therefore transition away from both producing and consuming oil as well as appropriately taxing the import of oil and oil derivatives to encourage other countries to do likewise.
No. We should maximise oil production in democratic states in order to minimise the flow of cash to despots and dictators. As long as we need it, the "west" should produce it.
This.
Regdrding renewables. The economic arguments for wind turbines etc. are barking. They have to be backed 100% by conventional power stations (gas) to cover still windless dark cold periods.
The eco argument is equally ludicrous and industry destroying with higher costs when China and India etc extracting vast amounts of coal for cheap electricity.
There is an argument for it on security reasons, with our own oil running out thenturbines mean we need less gas/oil from Vladimir and Khassogis murderers.
But pointing that out would mean the politicians saying "we've cocked up energy policy, ours is running out and we've got to spend a fortune otherwise Vlad and Sundry Sheiks will have us over a barrel"
Far better to say "you wicked people, you are destroying the planet, we must go green to save it"
The downside of that is that the green zealots are as uncontrollable and destructive as any other zealot and they have been allowed within the citadel.
oh, ffs.
The anti wind argument again.
We should be moving toward a mixed energy source system, which for the majority of time would mean most of our energy being provided by wind/solar. In these times only a small amount is fossil fuel based. EG now we have 15GW wind/solar and 5GW gas fired. Sometimes that mix needs to change obviously, but overall the use of wind/solar reduces our need for gas on average.
The anti-renewables loons are Putin's little shills.
As well as being a big exporter of fossil fuels, Russia is one of the few countries that is likely to benefit from anthropogenic climate change, so it's in their interests to deter moves away from fossil fuel consumption. It is also in their interest for those countries with small reserves to squander them as quickly as possible on fuel production so that they will be dependent on countries like Russia for raw materials for plastics, etc, in the future.
There seems to be no shortage of useful idiots, especially on the right of the political spectrum.
Many of the rewnewables-or-nothing loons, like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, are Putin's little shills as well. He knows we will keep on buying fossil fuels for the immediate future, but the arguments between the anti-renewables and environmental extremists suit him, as they are very disruptive.
As for your last line: I might suggest that Just Stop Oil's behaviour over the last few days shows the useful idiots are also on the left of the political spectrum as well.
So you also believe that we should extract every last drop of UK oil as quickly as possible, thus leaving us at the mercy of Russia and Saudi Arabia in the future when it's all gone?
No.
It's a matter of progress. We need to move towards green energy - and we've been doing that really, really fast (*). But there is a limit to the speed by which we can do that without ruining the economy, and major technological hurdles remain (social ones as well, but less so).
Whilst this is in progress and we need oil and gas, we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Whilst also going great guns towards both reducing the need for oil and gas, and also being greener.
The alternate view involves us buying the oil and gas we need from those very regimes you named. Except not in some hypothetical future, but right now.
(*) It is a crying shame that so many so-called environmentalists ignore this.
That view epitomises short-term thinking. We know that our reserves of fossil fuels are small compared to those of Russia, etc, and we also know that we will need a certain amount of fossil fuel for essential purposes for an indefinite period. Given those two facts, it makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now. It's asking for trouble in the future.
As for going great guns, no. While we, as a planet, have made some progress towards reducing emissions, it has been pitifully slow, to the extent that there has thus far been no noticeable effect on the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is still accelerating. We are applauding our efforts while losing the war.
No. My view epitomises both long-term and short-term thinking. What we need to do now, to get where we need to be in the future. You just want to give as much money as possible to bad/evil regimes now. Regimes who have no reason to advance a green future. Gradatim ferociter, as a certain billionaire might say.
" makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now."
Gas and oil is used for essential purposes now. Even on a sunny day with some wind, gas is providing us with some power. Petrol and diesel is allowing most of us to get around. And you think that is non-essential?
As for your last paragraph: we as a country have been going great guns. The world might not have been, but it's crass to deny how much progress our country has made over the last two decades.
When I look at of my window at all the single-occupant tonka-truck SUVs driving past my house, it's pretty hard to believe that we are using all that oil for essential purposes. Ditto the tourist-filled jets flying overhead.
You have zero idea why people are making those journeys. Zero. They may not seem essential to you; but can I judge your lifestyle too, please?
Now you're just being ridiculous. You're effectively claiming that every journey made is essential. Even if that were the case, it is certainly not essential that it be made in a gas-guzzling SUV. And you have the gall to call me a Putin apologist? Just take a look at yourself.
Yes, every journey made is essential for whoever is making that journey for whatever reason they are making it.
We should be wanting to increase mobility and ensure more journeys can be made for whatever reason than they are now.
As we head into a cleaner, electric, future the cost of motoring ought to be a tiny fraction of what it is today and we ought to see many more journeys made. Cleanly.
We clearly have very different understandings of the meaning of the word "essential".
Clearly.
Name a single journey you could eliminate which wouldn't harm anyone's economic, mental or physical health or wellbeing.
For lots of people in office jobs, the commute.
No thanks. I went back to the office (with permission) towards the end of one of the lockdowns (can't remember which one) as working at home was driving me crazy.
I don't like WFH either, but it was a great opportunity to increase productivity (gain all those hours back commuting) and spread housing demand more evenly around the country.
Just imagine if we had used increased home working as a way of achieving levelling up. We could have spread work around the country and revitalised the high street in every town. City centres would have taken a hit, but the pandemic was the perfect cover for the transition.
Remember the laments on PB on how London would rot from the core outwards. And how too too awful it was for the property investors.
Remind me, have we had record rent increases in the whole country over the last year, or just in London?
Round here we rented a two bedroom house 23 years ago for £650 a month. You are looking at about £1000-1100 for something similar.
Inflation over that period takes £650 to £1183.
House I bought later that year now up over 300% in value.
That doesn't strike me as plausible.
650 to 1100 in 23 years is about 2.3% p.a. rise. The data I've found on a quick search shows Bedford and the wider EoE running at about 4% since 2016, albeit fluctuating between +8 and -1%. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/housingpriceslocal/E06000055/ That would mean for the 15 years preceding that, rent inflation would have to be about 1.4% p.a. in order to get from 650 to 1100. I think there's something wrong with what you said, possibly a highly unrepresentative example.
Rents were virtually static for years. Only in recent years have prices risen significantly.
That's equivalent of 650 -> 1282 (England) or 650 -> 1226 (excluding London) over 23 years, if 2001-2009 is similar. But I don't have that data to hand. Still looks wrong to me.
I've been watching this data for years (since before 2007), and there is often material in the English Housing Survey.
Key points for me are:
1 - Private rents have been increasing below inflation (dependent a little on your chosen inflation rate) since the millenium roughly.
2 - Social rents have generally increased faster, for policy reasons.
3 - London skews national averages by several hundred £££ per month, or about 25%. So splitting London / not London is really important.
4 - Organisations claiming to represent renters (and I include Shelter in that), and media, are just not interested in accurate information. It is all about politics and attention-seeking, and if they need to tell fairy stories, that is exactly what they will do, and it will be reported as facts demonstrating scandals by media.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
They also have a shot in Bristol Central, so maybe four seats is their high watermark?
It's a great question you pose. No idea why they have become a looney bin for nutters of the Far Left like the Ludicrous Owls on here. One hopes that if they do gain these conservation seats with handsome rivers they focus on what they are supposed to focus on: the environment.
I was actually positing a situation where they are disappointed with not progressing in their urban targets (like Bristol central) but successful in the sticks. Ie they may end up with only Brighton, or not even that. Plus the 2 rural seats. But didn’t quite explain that properly.
If they win in Bristol then this reaffirms their role as left wing urban opposition to Labour. If they fail there but win in places like Herefordshire it really sets them on a different trajectory.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
I know a few Greens in Scotland and England, and most of the ones I know are more in it for the environmental reasons. There are a couple of die-hard socialists in there though. All of them long-standing members, I don't know any new joiners.
Greens have long had a problem deciding on the core of their identity, and on incomers treating them as a place to go when their own political home collapses.
An example was the Comrade Delta rape-crisis in the SWP, when a lot of appalled SWP members treated the Greens as a landing zone.
Do Greens want to be a party of liberal democracy, or of the revolutionary (even rhetorical 'revolutionary') left? They are still imo not clear about that, and the two are not really compatible.
It is a live and longstanding debate within the party; the sort of debate I honestly cannot be arsed with.
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
My position is that I would seriously consider voting for a Green as Local Councillor, but would need a *lot* of thought to do it in a national election.
But in Ashfield it's not very likely to be an opportunity .
TBF the Greens are the only party known to me with an ideological commitment to Active Travel based on values - for everybody else it is tactical.
Yes - and that's a really important reason for me too.
Environmentalism is not just about climate, far from it - and it should be reasonably left/right agnostic, or at least have ideological space to consider different solutions to the same acknowledged issues, whether that be active travel, shit in the rivers or the response to climate change. I want people who might otherwise vote Tory to be able consider voting Green without being put off by Trots banging on about Palestine.
There’s a full throated “Tory” (though not right wing in the ways it’s often now thought of because of Thatcher and Reagan) way of pushing green issues which no one wants to do. A conservationist approach to conservatism, which is also thinking about being first to the newer, greener tech. An old school one nation Tory of the kind we don’t have any more would be the first to campaign against poo in rivers.
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
They should be getting the AMRAAM-C, I think ? (If they can be Mae to carry the Meteor, which is a vague possibility then that's a much longer range bit of kit.) Will likely carry ARMs, but I doubt they'll be used much for bombing; too valuable.
Our resident aviator, if he hasn't left for good, will no doubt drop by to tell me I'm spouting nonsense,
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
They should be getting the AMRAAM-C, I think ? (If they can be Mae to carry the Meteor, which is a vague possibility then that's a much longer range bit of kit.) Will likely carry ARMs, but I doubt they'll be used much for bombing; too valuable.
Our resident aviator, if he hasn't left for good, will no doubt drop by to tell me I'm spouting nonsense,
I also wonder if MBDA has done any integration work on Storm Shadow. It must have looked at it in the past for export to countries with F16.
It’s quite conceivable the Greens could end up with 3 seats, one being Brighton and the other two those rural seats now looking in play. Or even just those two and lose Brighton.
That would represent a huge paradigm shift for the party. The people in Herefordshire and Suffolk will be voting for them for good old nature conservation reason. They almost certainly worry about climate change too, and they may well think favourably about nationalising water companies, but I doubt many are unreconstructed Corbynites obsessed with Israel or the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
Does the national party evolve to look more like its Herefordshire and Suffolk representatives in that situation, or does it carry on as the watermelon party regardless?
They also have a shot in Bristol Central, so maybe four seats is their high watermark?
It's a great question you pose. No idea why they have become a looney bin for nutters of the Far Left like the Ludicrous Owls on here. One hopes that if they do gain these conservation seats with handsome rivers they focus on what they are supposed to focus on: the environment.
I was actually positing a situation where they are disappointed with not progressing in their urban targets (like Bristol central) but successful in the sticks. Ie they may end up with only Brighton, or not even that. Plus the 2 rural seats. But didn’t quite explain that properly.
If they win in Bristol then this reaffirms their role as left wing urban opposition to Labour. If they fail there but win in places like Herefordshire it really sets them on a different trajectory.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. Interesting analysis.
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
Yes they will, I think. They already have decent bombs such as JDAM, and are developing their own.
They will also get good A2A missiles - range up to 100-150km perhaps?
But the numbers of jets will be tiny, and unless the long range (300-400km range) Russian ground based AA systems are wiped out, the potential impact of F16s is limited.
Russian glide bombs have a range of around 60-70km aiui, potentially less for the Big Berthas.
So imo more of the longer range ground based missiles may be more impactful on this type of attack for Ukraine. Patriot potentially, but they do not get huge numbers of Patriot missiles - the current desperate scrape-around-all-the-allies has only come up with less than 100 extra so far on the numbers I have picked up.
"Having run through a sackful of other messages that didn’t work, [the Conservatives are] going for the pity vote. Don’t vote for us because you like our policies or because we’ve got a good leader or because we’ve done a good job. Vote for us, please, so we don’t get wiped out.
"It is known as the Queensland Gambit after an Australian election back in the 1990s where it worked.
"It is the political equivalent of the sad puppy photo that dog rescue centres use:
(How could I not use my one daily picture on a cute doggy? Awwww.)
I googled "Queensland Gambit" and found this by Clive James:
For Hague to snatch a victory, the Queensland gambit would have to work. On the weekend, the press told us a lot about the Queensland gambit, a stratagem which can be outlined in a single sentence if you don’t mind doing without the graphs and pie-charts. The side sure to lose warns against the dictatorial ambitions of the side sure to win, whereupon everybody votes for the side sure to lose, which then wins. It worked in Queensland, but you have to remember that Australia’s most fun-filled state is also the place where the responsible authorities took a long look at the first cane toad and decided it was environmentally friendly. By the time they found out that it could poison a moving car and couldn’t be killed with a flame-thrower, it had spawned a million children and learned to vote.
Johnny Mercer is a nasty piece of work. He's now claiming his Labour opponent lied about his military background without any evidence.
Someone must be able to confirm whether or not the Lab candidate has been on active service. That seems to be the point of contention between Mercer and his opponent.
I mean a 15% lead over Sunak is hardly much to write home about in the circumstances?
The reality that Corbynista's struggle to accept is that there is a good 15-20% of the country, middle England if you like, who don't mind a Starmer type govt but would be very afraid of a Corbyn one, and that outweighs the few % Corbyn brings back with turnout and stopping leaks to the Greens.
Earlier, I said Norway was the main source of our imported oil. I come here to say I was wrong! I think Norway is the main source of our imported gas, but they're only second (a close second) to the US for oil (2023 data).
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
They should be getting the AMRAAM-C, I think ? (If they can be Mae to carry the Meteor, which is a vague possibility then that's a much longer range bit of kit.) Will likely carry ARMs, but I doubt they'll be used much for bombing; too valuable.
Our resident aviator, if he hasn't left for good, will no doubt drop by to tell me I'm spouting nonsense,
I also wonder if MBDA has done any integration work on Storm Shadow. It must have looked at it in the past for export to countries with F16.
I don't think that (or eg Taurus) would be a problem at all. But they're probably not going to use it for that, either given they don't seem to have a problem launching them form much less valuable platforms.
This appointed court is not a part of our constitution; it has no legitimacy, and it is effectively making up law. It needs to be binned.
Um no, it interprets the current law and generates a result.
The new Labour Government can change the law and fix the issue all the Supreme Court has done is combine the law as it currently is and come to (an admittedly unexpected) conclusion..
People like @Luckyguy1983 clearly have no understanding of our legal system whatsoever. This is how it has ALWAYS worked.
Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities. It is a complete abuse of "supreme court" powers to intervene on these spurious grounds, effectively to prevent any new oil wells being built in this country - economical self-harm which is for elected parliamentarians to inflict if they so wish, because they can be de-elected again. It's not for an appointed body to stretch its remit and make decisions like this.
They can intervene if the process was not followed properly. That’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law.
Their judgement is based upon a highly troubling interpretation of what that process should be - that's the point. The emissions involved in the set up and ongoing operation of the business were reported on in the usual way. The emissions generated subsequently were not, and I've explained why to demand that they are is deeply concerning in other posts.
I worry that this bit of the above… : “ Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities”
…Shows a confusion between parliament and the executive.
Parliament makes laws. The executive (Government or SCC) makes decisions which should be legal, but if there is doubt the Judicial system will decide
This is part of the citizenship exam. Maybe it should be taught in schools too?
That's true but the court made a mistake in its ruling.
The emissions generated by the burning of the oil should not be counted as the net difference of oil burnt as a result of the well is zero.
Why zero? Because oil is fungible and had we not extracted from this well we'd have just imported from Saudi Arabia or somewhere else the exact same amount of oil.
So the total net emissions of a fungible product is zero, unless or until we start forbidding imports.
As pointed out by someone previously, the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the issue, but only on whether the county council had considered the substance of the issue. Which they had not.
So your objection is not relevant, or in order, and we could expect that a revised planning decision from the country council, which did consider the substance of the issue, has a high probability of concluding that it shouldn't be a bar to approving the application, for the logical reasons you set out.
That outcome would be law followed, planning approved, everyone happy (especially the lawyers!)
Not the locals. Not people who care about the countryside. Not those who want to save the planet.
but, yeah, it was about legal processes at the moment
I want to save the planet.
To do that we need to follow science, not dogma.
The science is we need to transition away from consuming oil.
We still need oil for the transition though and there is no scientific reason why OPEC-produced oil is better for the environment than domestically produced oil.
If the world needs to transition away from consuming oil, then basic logic says that the world also has to transition away from producing oil. As a country, we should therefore transition away from both producing and consuming oil as well as appropriately taxing the import of oil and oil derivatives to encourage other countries to do likewise.
No. We should maximise oil production in democratic states in order to minimise the flow of cash to despots and dictators. As long as we need it, the "west" should produce it.
This.
Regdrding renewables. The economic arguments for wind turbines etc. are barking. They have to be backed 100% by conventional power stations (gas) to cover still windless dark cold periods.
The eco argument is equally ludicrous and industry destroying with higher costs when China and India etc extracting vast amounts of coal for cheap electricity.
There is an argument for it on security reasons, with our own oil running out thenturbines mean we need less gas/oil from Vladimir and Khassogis murderers.
But pointing that out would mean the politicians saying "we've cocked up energy policy, ours is running out and we've got to spend a fortune otherwise Vlad and Sundry Sheiks will have us over a barrel"
Far better to say "you wicked people, you are destroying the planet, we must go green to save it"
The downside of that is that the green zealots are as uncontrollable and destructive as any other zealot and they have been allowed within the citadel.
oh, ffs.
The anti wind argument again.
We should be moving toward a mixed energy source system, which for the majority of time would mean most of our energy being provided by wind/solar. In these times only a small amount is fossil fuel based. EG now we have 15GW wind/solar and 5GW gas fired. Sometimes that mix needs to change obviously, but overall the use of wind/solar reduces our need for gas on average.
The anti-renewables loons are Putin's little shills.
As well as being a big exporter of fossil fuels, Russia is one of the few countries that is likely to benefit from anthropogenic climate change, so it's in their interests to deter moves away from fossil fuel consumption. It is also in their interest for those countries with small reserves to squander them as quickly as possible on fuel production so that they will be dependent on countries like Russia for raw materials for plastics, etc, in the future.
There seems to be no shortage of useful idiots, especially on the right of the political spectrum.
Many of the rewnewables-or-nothing loons, like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, are Putin's little shills as well. He knows we will keep on buying fossil fuels for the immediate future, but the arguments between the anti-renewables and environmental extremists suit him, as they are very disruptive.
As for your last line: I might suggest that Just Stop Oil's behaviour over the last few days shows the useful idiots are also on the left of the political spectrum as well.
So you also believe that we should extract every last drop of UK oil as quickly as possible, thus leaving us at the mercy of Russia and Saudi Arabia in the future when it's all gone?
No.
It's a matter of progress. We need to move towards green energy - and we've been doing that really, really fast (*). But there is a limit to the speed by which we can do that without ruining the economy, and major technological hurdles remain (social ones as well, but less so).
Whilst this is in progress and we need oil and gas, we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Whilst also going great guns towards both reducing the need for oil and gas, and also being greener.
The alternate view involves us buying the oil and gas we need from those very regimes you named. Except not in some hypothetical future, but right now.
(*) It is a crying shame that so many so-called environmentalists ignore this.
That view epitomises short-term thinking. We know that our reserves of fossil fuels are small compared to those of Russia, etc, and we also know that we will need a certain amount of fossil fuel for essential purposes for an indefinite period. Given those two facts, it makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now. It's asking for trouble in the future.
As for going great guns, no. While we, as a planet, have made some progress towards reducing emissions, it has been pitifully slow, to the extent that there has thus far been no noticeable effect on the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is still accelerating. We are applauding our efforts while losing the war.
My mother told me the other day that in the late 1950s she missed out on a geography field trip to Italy as part of her degree because the airfare was £400 return (nominal, not equivalent of). Nowadays it's potentially £20. This seems wrong.
The question does arise whether a train would have been viable but it is sadly too late to ask
The international aviation market is skewed, in the same way international shipping is. It's atrocious that aviation kerosene is tax exempt, especially for domestic flights, while rail or bus travel is liable for fuel duty.
Yet placing tax on aviation kerosene is very difficult due to the international nature of the industry.
That should be changed, even if people have to pay more for flights.
And whilst I'm world dictator, I'd also stop flags of convenience schemes in shipping, and ensure ships' crews are treated decently.
If the UK taxed Kerosene, the Emirates A380 would take off from Dubai with the tanks filled to the brim, land at Heathrow and fly back to Dubai without refuelling. Using quite a bit more fuel in the process. The BA A380 would do exactly the same on Dubai trips.
Planes flying domestic routes would make a point of going somewhere close (Amsterdam, Dublin) to fill up there.
Airline flight planning departments already factor in the price of fuel at various destinations, when deciding how much to carry on any given flight.
I know that's the difficulty; I'm just saying it is a farcical situation and in a sane world would not happen.
This appointed court is not a part of our constitution; it has no legitimacy, and it is effectively making up law. It needs to be binned.
Um no, it interprets the current law and generates a result.
The new Labour Government can change the law and fix the issue all the Supreme Court has done is combine the law as it currently is and come to (an admittedly unexpected) conclusion..
People like @Luckyguy1983 clearly have no understanding of our legal system whatsoever. This is how it has ALWAYS worked.
Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities. It is a complete abuse of "supreme court" powers to intervene on these spurious grounds, effectively to prevent any new oil wells being built in this country - economical self-harm which is for elected parliamentarians to inflict if they so wish, because they can be de-elected again. It's not for an appointed body to stretch its remit and make decisions like this.
They can intervene if the process was not followed properly. That’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law.
Their judgement is based upon a highly troubling interpretation of what that process should be - that's the point. The emissions involved in the set up and ongoing operation of the business were reported on in the usual way. The emissions generated subsequently were not, and I've explained why to demand that they are is deeply concerning in other posts.
I worry that this bit of the above… : “ Whether a new oil well can proceed legally is a matter for parliament and the appropriate local authorities”
…Shows a confusion between parliament and the executive.
Parliament makes laws. The executive (Government or SCC) makes decisions which should be legal, but if there is doubt the Judicial system will decide
This is part of the citizenship exam. Maybe it should be taught in schools too?
That's true but the court made a mistake in its ruling.
The emissions generated by the burning of the oil should not be counted as the net difference of oil burnt as a result of the well is zero.
Why zero? Because oil is fungible and had we not extracted from this well we'd have just imported from Saudi Arabia or somewhere else the exact same amount of oil.
So the total net emissions of a fungible product is zero, unless or until we start forbidding imports.
As pointed out by someone previously, the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the issue, but only on whether the county council had considered the substance of the issue. Which they had not.
So your objection is not relevant, or in order, and we could expect that a revised planning decision from the country council, which did consider the substance of the issue, has a high probability of concluding that it shouldn't be a bar to approving the application, for the logical reasons you set out.
That outcome would be law followed, planning approved, everyone happy (especially the lawyers!)
Not the locals. Not people who care about the countryside. Not those who want to save the planet.
but, yeah, it was about legal processes at the moment
I want to save the planet.
To do that we need to follow science, not dogma.
The science is we need to transition away from consuming oil.
We still need oil for the transition though and there is no scientific reason why OPEC-produced oil is better for the environment than domestically produced oil.
If the world needs to transition away from consuming oil, then basic logic says that the world also has to transition away from producing oil. As a country, we should therefore transition away from both producing and consuming oil as well as appropriately taxing the import of oil and oil derivatives to encourage other countries to do likewise.
No. We should maximise oil production in democratic states in order to minimise the flow of cash to despots and dictators. As long as we need it, the "west" should produce it.
This.
Regdrding renewables. The economic arguments for wind turbines etc. are barking. They have to be backed 100% by conventional power stations (gas) to cover still windless dark cold periods.
The eco argument is equally ludicrous and industry destroying with higher costs when China and India etc extracting vast amounts of coal for cheap electricity.
There is an argument for it on security reasons, with our own oil running out thenturbines mean we need less gas/oil from Vladimir and Khassogis murderers.
But pointing that out would mean the politicians saying "we've cocked up energy policy, ours is running out and we've got to spend a fortune otherwise Vlad and Sundry Sheiks will have us over a barrel"
Far better to say "you wicked people, you are destroying the planet, we must go green to save it"
The downside of that is that the green zealots are as uncontrollable and destructive as any other zealot and they have been allowed within the citadel.
oh, ffs.
The anti wind argument again.
We should be moving toward a mixed energy source system, which for the majority of time would mean most of our energy being provided by wind/solar. In these times only a small amount is fossil fuel based. EG now we have 15GW wind/solar and 5GW gas fired. Sometimes that mix needs to change obviously, but overall the use of wind/solar reduces our need for gas on average.
The anti-renewables loons are Putin's little shills.
As well as being a big exporter of fossil fuels, Russia is one of the few countries that is likely to benefit from anthropogenic climate change, so it's in their interests to deter moves away from fossil fuel consumption. It is also in their interest for those countries with small reserves to squander them as quickly as possible on fuel production so that they will be dependent on countries like Russia for raw materials for plastics, etc, in the future.
There seems to be no shortage of useful idiots, especially on the right of the political spectrum.
Many of the rewnewables-or-nothing loons, like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, are Putin's little shills as well. He knows we will keep on buying fossil fuels for the immediate future, but the arguments between the anti-renewables and environmental extremists suit him, as they are very disruptive.
As for your last line: I might suggest that Just Stop Oil's behaviour over the last few days shows the useful idiots are also on the left of the political spectrum as well.
So you also believe that we should extract every last drop of UK oil as quickly as possible, thus leaving us at the mercy of Russia and Saudi Arabia in the future when it's all gone?
No.
It's a matter of progress. We need to move towards green energy - and we've been doing that really, really fast (*). But there is a limit to the speed by which we can do that without ruining the economy, and major technological hurdles remain (social ones as well, but less so).
Whilst this is in progress and we need oil and gas, we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Whilst also going great guns towards both reducing the need for oil and gas, and also being greener.
The alternate view involves us buying the oil and gas we need from those very regimes you named. Except not in some hypothetical future, but right now.
(*) It is a crying shame that so many so-called environmentalists ignore this.
That view epitomises short-term thinking. We know that our reserves of fossil fuels are small compared to those of Russia, etc, and we also know that we will need a certain amount of fossil fuel for essential purposes for an indefinite period. Given those two facts, it makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now. It's asking for trouble in the future.
As for going great guns, no. While we, as a planet, have made some progress towards reducing emissions, it has been pitifully slow, to the extent that there has thus far been no noticeable effect on the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is still accelerating. We are applauding our efforts while losing the war.
No. My view epitomises both long-term and short-term thinking. What we need to do now, to get where we need to be in the future. You just want to give as much money as possible to bad/evil regimes now. Regimes who have no reason to advance a green future. Gradatim ferociter, as a certain billionaire might say.
" makes no long-term sense at all to be exploiting our own reserves for non-essential purposes now."
Gas and oil is used for essential purposes now. Even on a sunny day with some wind, gas is providing us with some power. Petrol and diesel is allowing most of us to get around. And you think that is non-essential?
As for your last paragraph: we as a country have been going great guns. The world might not have been, but it's crass to deny how much progress our country has made over the last two decades.
When I look at of my window at all the single-occupant tonka-truck SUVs driving past my house, it's pretty hard to believe that we are using all that oil for essential purposes. Ditto the tourist-filled jets flying overhead.
You have zero idea why people are making those journeys. Zero. They may not seem essential to you; but can I judge your lifestyle too, please?
Now you're just being ridiculous. You're effectively claiming that every journey made is essential. Even if that were the case, it is certainly not essential that it be made in a gas-guzzling SUV. And you have the gall to call me a Putin apologist? Just take a look at yourself.
I'm claiming no such thing. But how do you define 'essential' ?
I have just been for a swim. The two nearest pools are about ten miles away - more if I cycle, as the main roads are not ideal for cycling and the country roads are more enjoyable. I swim two to three times a week, and although I occasionally cycle, that takes another hour out of my day.
Are those drives 'essential'? Perhaps not from a national perspective, but from my perspective: hell, yes.
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
When we say “F16”, what weapons are they getting though? Will they get medium and long range air to air like that, and will they get decent laser guided bombs?
They should be getting the AMRAAM-C, I think ? (If they can be Mae to carry the Meteor, which is a vague possibility then that's a much longer range bit of kit.) Will likely carry ARMs, but I doubt they'll be used much for bombing; too valuable.
Our resident aviator, if he hasn't left for good, will no doubt drop by to tell me I'm spouting nonsense,
I also wonder if MBDA has done any integration work on Storm Shadow. It must have looked at it in the past for export to countries with F16.
I don't think that (or eg Taurus) would be a problem at all. But they're probably not going to use it for that, either given they don't seem to have a problem launching them form much less valuable platforms.
A new AAM would be more difficult.
This account gives some detail of Ukrainian thinking on how they'll be used, which is more or less what I'd thought. Until they get a lot more of them - and more importantly have pilots who've accumulated a lot more experience (F16 proficient pilots will be in shorter supply than airframes for some time), they're going to be very cautious with deployment.
Of course, this point is not lost on Ukrainian planners and Golubtsov confirms that some of the F-16s will remain at bases in other countries where they will continue to be used to train pilots and maintainers but will also provide a reserve that the Ukrainian Air Force can tap into when more airframes are needed. The likely locations include Denmark and Romania, where Ukrainian pilots are known to be training on F-16s...
"What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British)"
"If only Britain knew how it was viewed abroad If the country were a person, it would need its friends to sit it down and deliver it a few home truths about its damaging behaviour to itself and others, says Michael Peel"
You don’t have to spend too much time on history twitter so see stuff like this:
We are profoundly ignorant of our history, as a society. There was a survey doing the rounds around the D-Day anniversary the other week that said that supposedly half of the UK thought we had done the most, as a country, to win WW2.
I love my country, we have done wonderful things throughout history. But I wish we had a more grown up, nuanced understanding of our history and the things we have done, good and bad, and how that’s impacted other countries and peoples, for good or ill. That might help ameliorate the problems the column highlights.
I’m not holding my breath, the English, especially the elites, do so love their self-bestowed exceptionalism.
Trying to determine who "did the most" to win WWII is willy-waving, that we, the Americans, and Russians all engage in. I think it would be fair to say that each of those three (and don't forget China) was indispensable towards the achievement of victory.
The Royal Navy, US economic might, and Soviet manpower were key to victory.
I've never read serious history books that portray the UK as some kind of meek little labrador. Being portrayed as the werwolf is actually pretty cool, but overstates our power.
Isn’t there a famous summation of this
The British bought the time The Americans provided the money The Russians gave the me
Comments
Scottish independence.
Any chance you can tone down the smuttiness? Ask yourself, ‘What would Mike think?’
But I suspect it will take them into Labour’s second term before they begin to come to their senses on that.
He was my inspiration.
So no I don't think it bad to want to have 100% 5G coverage and to reform planning to have them built. Would you rather I didn't comment on things I know about?
Coalition can work, but small majorities are a nightmare for both getting things done and focusing on what needs doing.
From (long) memory, cluster houses were about £450-500 pcm then.
So what's bad about increasing transportation?
If there's extra transportation due to economic growth, then growth is a good thing, is it not?
My personal ethics are fairly radical and probably place me as an eco-socialist, but party politics I'm full on centrist dad really; above all else I want competence and compassion, and ideally within that a strong voice for environmental concerns. Though I'm not a million miles away from Momentum et al ideologically, I deplore their divisiveness, rudeness and *certainty*, as well as the harping on niche issues that effect hardly anyone IRL. Student politics, basically. It is ignorant and massively unempathetic.
So I am well and truly in the 'liberal democracy' camp, because I would actually appreciate a cat-in-hell's chance of actually persuading people.
I don't know about other out-and-proud Greens on the site - the only other I'm aware of is Dura Ace who I might guess is more towards the revolutionary end.
= everyone should just stay in their little corner of the world, like hermits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOy7e8rHArg
Russia uses for the first time a massive FAB-3000 M-54 guided bomb in Kharkiv Oblast
The bomb has a reported radius of continuous destruction of 230 meters (754 ft), with fragments retaining their lethal force at a distance of 1,240 meters (4068 ft)
https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1804104706840465854
Massive glide bombs like that are delivered pretty close to the front, by bombers which wouldn't easily evade AMRAAM shots.
But in Ashfield it's not very likely to be an opportunity
TBF the Greens are the only party known to me with an ideological commitment to Active Travel based on values - for everybody else it is tactical.
However, it's definitely a trip that I would classify as non-essential, but I disagree that frivolous journeys should necessarily be discouraged. Life is for fun as well as for necessity.
🚨NEW Starmer extends his lead over Sunak on who would make Best PM
📈Record 15-point lead for Labour leader vs Sunak on all-important metric
2,050 UK adults, 14-16 June
(change from 7-9 June)
https://x.com/Savanta_UK/status/1804133648720969893
Environmentalism is not just about climate, far from it - and it should be reasonably left/right agnostic, or at least have ideological space to consider different solutions to the same acknowledged issues, whether that be active travel, shit in the rivers or the response to climate change. I want people who might otherwise vote Tory to be able consider voting Green without being put off by Trots banging on about Palestine.
https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1803555145311285517?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1803555145311285517|twgr^037374d2c6262b057d640ce8df04fa80f3a46f6d|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/20/2247604/-This-3-minute-video-of-Trump-is-absolutely-devastating
We are starting to see the first hints of a move in Biden's direction at last. Trump's still ahead in most the battleground states though.
Like your wife though - I also despair at them faffing around with stuff that is off-brief.
According to him the electorate is 46,426,788 of which 31,328,932 people will be voting.
If you take his turnout estimates and apply them to the latest Yougov MRP then Blyth and Ashington, expected to be the first declaration yields
Labour 30746
Conservative 3843
Reform 8647
Lib Dem 2402
Green 2402
The end of night totals are predicted to be
Labour / 11962828 / 38.18% / 434
Conservative 6954209 / 22.19% / 104
Reform 4806080 / 15.34% / 5
Lib Dem 3807351 / 12.15% / 66
Green 2086322 / 6.66% / 2
SNP & PC 1149318 / 3.67% / 23
Everyone else 568307 / 1.81% / 0
If you do the same exercise on his ordered seats, Blyth and Ashington is projected at
LAB / CON / RFM / LIB / GRN / OTH
26950 / 8551 / 8791 / 2162 / 1585 / 0
With the end of the night at
41.77%/ 24.71%/ 12.87%/ 11.42%/ 4.44%/ 4.79%
LAB (456)/ CON (75)/ RFM (3)/ LIB (66)/GRN (2)/ NAT (32)
(Of course 31.3m total votes the same as the Yougov tally)
Spreadsheet comparing the models
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R-AChxDPCIm2kpSJrbwr4pzE_auzeYm__hZukaloLow/edit?usp=sharing
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/indexofprivatehousingrentalprices/january2024
I've been watching this data for years (since before 2007), and there is often material in the English Housing Survey.
Key points for me are:
1 - Private rents have been increasing below inflation (dependent a little on your chosen inflation rate) since the millenium roughly.
2 - Social rents have generally increased faster, for policy reasons.
3 - London skews national averages by several hundred £££ per month, or about 25%. So splitting London / not London is really important.
4 - Organisations claiming to represent renters (and I include Shelter in that), and media, are just not interested in accurate information. It is all about politics and attention-seeking, and if they need to tell fairy stories, that is exactly what they will do, and it will be reported as facts demonstrating scandals by media.
that properly.
If they win in Bristol then this reaffirms their role as left wing urban opposition to Labour. If they fail there but win in places like Herefordshire it really sets them on a different trajectory.
The 4 RefUK seats are Clacton, Boston & Skegness, Castle Point, Basildon South & Thurrock East. Greens to hold Brighton Pavilion.
https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts
(If they can be Mae to carry the Meteor, which is a vague possibility then that's a much longer range bit of kit.)
Will likely carry ARMs, but I doubt they'll be used much for bombing; too valuable.
Our resident aviator, if he hasn't left for good, will no doubt drop by to tell me I'm spouting nonsense,
They will also get good A2A missiles - range up to 100-150km perhaps?
But the numbers of jets will be tiny, and unless the long range (300-400km range) Russian ground based AA systems are wiped out, the potential impact of F16s is limited.
Russian glide bombs have a range of around 60-70km aiui, potentially less for the Big Berthas.
So imo more of the longer range ground based missiles may be more impactful on this type of attack for Ukraine. Patriot potentially, but they do not get huge numbers of Patriot missiles - the current desperate scrape-around-all-the-allies has only come up with less than 100 extra so far on the numbers I have picked up.
https://www.markpack.org.uk/173220/the-sad-puppy-gambit-and-other-general-election-news-ldn-185/
"Having run through a sackful of other messages that didn’t work, [the Conservatives are] going for the pity vote. Don’t vote for us because you like our policies or because we’ve got a good leader or because we’ve done a good job. Vote for us, please, so we don’t get wiped out.
"It is known as the Queensland Gambit after an Australian election back in the 1990s where it worked.
"It is the political equivalent of the sad puppy photo that dog rescue centres use:
(How could I not use my one daily picture on a cute doggy? Awwww.)
I googled "Queensland Gambit" and found this by Clive James:
For Hague to snatch a victory, the Queensland gambit would have to work. On the weekend, the press told us a lot about the Queensland gambit, a stratagem which can be outlined in a single sentence if you don’t mind doing without the graphs and pie-charts. The side sure to lose warns against the dictatorial ambitions of the side sure to win, whereupon everybody votes for the side sure to lose, which then wins. It worked in Queensland, but you have to remember that Australia’s most fun-filled state is also the place where the responsible authorities took a long look at the first cane toad and decided it was environmentally friendly. By the time they found out that it could poison a moving car and couldn’t be killed with a flame-thrower, it had spawned a million children and learned to vote.
Newark and Ashfield go Labour, Mansfield stays Tory.
Ashfield numbers for the Referendum Party are 14.9%. The Leeanderthal Man will not be tweeting that one.
NEW THREAD
A new AAM would be more difficult.
I have just been for a swim. The two nearest pools are about ten miles away - more if I cycle, as the main roads are not ideal for cycling and the country roads are more enjoyable. I swim two to three times a week, and although I occasionally cycle, that takes another hour out of my day.
Are those drives 'essential'? Perhaps not from a national perspective, but from my perspective: hell, yes.
And when did I call you a 'Putin apologist' ?
Until they get a lot more of them - and more importantly have pilots who've accumulated a lot more experience (F16 proficient pilots will be in shorter supply than airframes for some time), they're going to be very cautious with deployment.
https://www.twz.com/air/ukrainian-su-25-frogfoots-now-using-french-hammer-guided-bombs-after-exhausting-rocket-stocks
...Golubtsov expects the addition of the F-16 to have a similar effect, forcing the Russians to change tactics or even suspend glide bomb operations in certain areas. At the same time, it will mean that Russia goes after the F-16s specifically, something that has also been seen in its efforts to destroy Patriot systems.
Of course, this point is not lost on Ukrainian planners and Golubtsov confirms that some of the F-16s will remain at bases in other countries where they will continue to be used to train pilots and maintainers but will also provide a reserve that the Ukrainian Air Force can tap into when more airframes are needed. The likely locations include Denmark and Romania, where Ukrainian pilots are known to be training on F-16s...