Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
The party of labour, on the side of working people.
The way to solve "Labour's taxing problem" is to reduce current public expenditure. They won't do that, so it should be rephrased "Labour's spending problem"
My prompt: Please write for me a typical trade union boss name
ChatGPT: A typical trade union boss name might be "John O'Reilly."
You: "What is a typical UVF name?:
AI:A typical UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) name often reflects a strong connection to Northern Irish culture and history. Names might include traditional Irish or Scottish surnames, or names that carry a sense of heritage or loyalty. Examples could be names like "Liam," "Sean," or "Ronan" for first names, and surnames like "McAllister," "O'Neill," or "Henderson."
And
You: Does the union jack fly on dublin castle.
AI:Yes, the Union Jack does fly at Dublin Castle, but it is typically only displayed on certain occasions, such as state visits or events involving the British royal family. Dublin Castle has a rich history and has served various roles over the years, so the flag's presence can vary depending on the context. If you're interested in more details about the castle or its history, feel free to ask!
Shurely shome mishtake?
On such foundations lies arguably the biggest and narrowest bubble in US stock market history
Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
The party of labour, on the side of working people.
If you look at the demographics that maps exactly to Labour, against the old, the sick, full time parents and students. Is that what you meant?
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
Those "infrastructure projects" had no funding and no prospect of funding under previous and current revenue assumptions. That's why they hadn't gone anywhere under the previous government. Infrastructure projects haven't been cancelled to pay for current spending because, simply, they weren't real. All Reeves has done here is drop the fiction.
A303 contracts let and enabling works started (which is why the A360 was closed for weeks for power cable installation to power the tunnel systems).
Would have been properly underway by now but for yet another vexatious court appeal.
Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
I think the winter fuel allowance will cut through. I mentioned yesterday that was a political choice, and it may be a hit Labour can afford to take at the moment, but if leaves them a hostage to fortune with “cold winter and I can’t eat/heat” stories.
Given the Tories are probably still going to be working out what the heck they stand for and Labour will be constantly painting them as the baddies here, not sure who the beneficiary will be. LDs or Reform I guess.
About par I would say. Reeves is trying to pin the blame for the tax rises on the previous government and is succeeding to some extent. But Labour will own any decisions from now on.
I think Labour will be pretty happy with these numbers and that the narrative holds but perhaps saw more pushback from Hunt then they were expecting.
Well the Tories blamed Labour for 14 years for any problems that arose so it is only fair Labour do the same now.
However I think people will accept it short term, after that Labour will be owning any decisions they make.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
Those "infrastructure projects" had no funding and no prospect of funding under previous and current revenue assumptions. That's why they hadn't gone anywhere under the previous government. Infrastructure projects haven't been cancelled to pay for current spending because, simply, they weren't real. All Reeves has done here is drop the fiction.
Wrong. A303 contracts let and enabling works started (which is why the A360 was closed for weeks for power cable installation to power the tunnel systems).
Would have been properly underway by now but for yet another vexatious court appeal.
The A303 seems to be the only one actually in progress and it's the contentious one...
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
Chap on the radio said that Labour/BoE could do some sort of QE switcheroo that would save £50 Bn. I know @Luckyguy1983 has mentioned it here before and it was in Reform's manifesto but the man on the radio was an ex BoE MPC member iirc, so should know 100% what he's on about. Apparently the ECB and Swiss banks would in theory have our £50 Bn saving if they were the BoE so it sounds to me like it is an implied £50 Bn bung to British banks which we could function perfectly well without.
Isn't it partly to allow more QE to be done when the next crisis occurs ?
I really hope it can go ahead on the alternate dates, and that it does not become a duathlon, as that would be unfair on the strong swimmers.
I thought you were a triathlete so why ha ha ha? I am a MTBer and I would have been gutted not to have yesterday's race
It's odd that the alternative is run bike run, why not have the swim in a swimming pool (shortened course/late at night if availablity is a problem)?
I am a triathlete (I've done one, at least, and another hopefully soon).
I'm laughing because Paris tried to clean up the river on the cheap. It was a gamble, but it was not doing the job properly. This was pointed out in civ eng circles a couple of years ago. They've been unlucky that there's been heavy rain, but they took that risk. Note that the 'solution' put in place for the games cost a billion euros, yet appears not to work very well. Remember, this is happening in summer, when rainfall is relatively low, yet the system has been overrun.
It's a shit solution to shit.
The options are to run the mens' swim after the women's tomorrow; run them both on an alternate date in a few days; or do a duathlon. There was talk about swimming on another river (the Meuse?) , but I presume that will be logistically difficult, as the bike and run courses would need to be nearby, even with split transitions - and then there's all the broadcasting stuff as well.
I don't know why they couldn't do it in a pool: I assume an access problem to a 50-metre pool, and the same problem with the bike and run courses needing to be nearby.
But there must be an established triathlon course somewhere near Paris? Surely doing it in the Seine is just for show? I don't know much about triathlons, but they seem to be ten a penny in this country. Surely an alternative non-shit-strewn course can be found?
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Well that's what Stodge is trying to imply is going to happen - it would be a brave (f***ing insane) move which I simply can't see even HMRC suggesting.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
And, of course, they are a party of the free market. So ...
Yes, the whole concept of the government negotiating centrally with ‘the doctors’ is totally alien to a free market.
Careful what you wish for though.
Multiple employers fighting for staff who are expensive and time-consuming to train so there's an underlying shortage...
... sounds like a recipe for doctors to play their employers like a fiddle and make even more than they do now. Near-monopsony (that's the word, isn't it?) probably helps the government keep pay down.
And I don't know about you, but I'd like my doctors to be able to command a well above average wage.
I would prefer my doctor to not be in it just for money, it is a cartel, paid a fortune no matter how crap you are.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
About par I would say. Reeves is trying to pin the blame for the tax rises on the previous government and is succeeding to some extent. But Labour will own any decisions from now on.
I think Labour will be pretty happy with these numbers and that the narrative holds but perhaps saw more pushback from Hunt then they were expecting.
The way to solve "Labour's taxing problem" is to reduce current public expenditure. They won't do that, so it should be rephrased "Labour's spending problem"
OK, what are the meaningful spending cuts that Prime Ministers from Cameron to Sunak.and Chancellors from Osborne to Hunt left on the table?
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
That's the key point. If the government are going to ignore pay boards when they give advice they don't like then how can they expect employees and unions to abide by recommendations they don't like? The award they came up with is hardly outlandish and to compare it to the 1970s is ludicrous.
My prompt: Please write for me a typical trade union boss name
ChatGPT: A typical trade union boss name might be "John O'Reilly."
You: "What is a typical UVF name?:
AI:A typical UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) name often reflects a strong connection to Northern Irish culture and history. Names might include traditional Irish or Scottish surnames, or names that carry a sense of heritage or loyalty. Examples could be names like "Liam," "Sean," or "Ronan" for first names, and surnames like "McAllister," "O'Neill," or "Henderson."
And
You: Does the union jack fly on dublin castle.
AI:Yes, the Union Jack does fly at Dublin Castle, but it is typically only displayed on certain occasions, such as state visits or events involving the British royal family. Dublin Castle has a rich history and has served various roles over the years, so the flag's presence can vary depending on the context. If you're interested in more details about the castle or its history, feel free to ask!
Shurely shome mishtake?
On such foundations lies arguably the biggest and narrowest bubble in US stock market history
ChatGPT, tell me what a stock market bubble is.
Ans: A bubble is a bull market in which the speaker does not have a longstanding long position.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
If you dig down into the Junior Doctors' 22.5% pay rise it includes last year, this year, next year and some of the year after. It is not a great deal more than the previous Government offered. The previous Government blamed the Junior Doctors for increases in NHS waiting lists, Doctors are leaving the service in droves. What did you expect this Government to do? Pick a fight with the BMA for the next five years.
Some of your criticism is wish casting a Labour Government failure.
The doctors have exposed themselves as liars with their '35% necessary to catch up with years of cuts' claims.
I've had more than 22.5% over that timescale as have large sections of the workforce.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
About par I would say. Reeves is trying to pin the blame for the tax rises on the previous government and is succeeding to some extent. But Labour will own any decisions from now on.
I think Labour will be pretty happy with these numbers and that the narrative holds but perhaps saw more pushback from Hunt then they were expecting.
Because the £22bn number is simply a lie.
It seems that Hunt didn't factor in this years pay rises when implementing the last NI cut..
Which is why the election was announced so suddenly when the pay review recommendations appeared in mid to late May.
I'm starting to think Hunt really deserves the rhyming version of his name.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
Care to point out some bloat at your local hospital....
Because I bet what for you is a unnecessary member of staff is someone else's essential specialist...
I really hope it can go ahead on the alternate dates, and that it does not become a duathlon, as that would be unfair on the strong swimmers.
I thought you were a triathlete so why ha ha ha? I am a MTBer and I would have been gutted not to have yesterday's race
It's odd that the alternative is run bike run, why not have the swim in a swimming pool (shortened course/late at night if availablity is a problem)?
I am a triathlete (I've done one, at least, and another hopefully soon).
I'm laughing because Paris tried to clean up the river on the cheap. It was a gamble, but it was not doing the job properly. This was pointed out in civ eng circles a couple of years ago. They've been unlucky that there's been heavy rain, but they took that risk. Note that the 'solution' put in place for the games cost a billion euros, yet appears not to work very well. Remember, this is happening in summer, when rainfall is relatively low, yet the system has been overrun.
It's a shit solution to shit.
The options are to run the mens' swim after the women's tomorrow; run them both on an alternate date in a few days; or do a duathlon. There was talk about swimming on another river (the Meuse?) , but I presume that will be logistically difficult, as the bike and run courses would need to be nearby, even with split transitions - and then there's all the broadcasting stuff as well.
I don't know why they couldn't do it in a pool: I assume an access problem to a 50-metre pool, and the same problem with the bike and run courses needing to be nearby.
But there must be an established triathlon course somewhere near Paris? Surely doing it in the Seine is just for show? I don't know much about triathlons, but they seem to be ten a penny in this country. Surely an alternative non-shit-strewn course can be found?
There are loads of triathlons in France - they have some good athletes, including the current Ironman world champion (Sam Laidlow, who, as his name suggests, is actually British...)
My *guess* is that moving the triathlon introduces a host of issues, including security, broadcasting, accommodation and everything else.
Also, the athletes will have been training for this particular course - and indeed, the athletes will have been selected by their countries specifically for this course. If the new course is significantly different, say hillier or faster, then it could be seen as being unfair. Though that might make it interesting - don't tell the athletes the course until the morning of the event.
The way to solve "Labour's taxing problem" is to reduce current public expenditure. They won't do that, so it should be rephrased "Labour's spending problem"
While I agree the deficit needs to be reduced, we get the classic Tory response of "cut spending".
Ok, where? Let's cut defence perhaps - do we really get value from the £66 billion we spend in that area? I suspect not but I also suspect no one is seriously going to consider it in the current climate so what areas of non-statutory spending would you cut?
About par I would say. Reeves is trying to pin the blame for the tax rises on the previous government and is succeeding to some extent. But Labour will own any decisions from now on.
I think Labour will be pretty happy with these numbers and that the narrative holds but perhaps saw more pushback from Hunt then they were expecting.
Well the Tories blamed Labour for 14 years for any problems that arose so it is only fair Labour do the same now.
However I think people will accept it short term, after that Labour will be owning any decisions they make.
Labour are politicians - they will only own their decisions when things go well.
When they go badly they will always blame someone or something else.
And the press is mostly spineless and clueless enough to let them get away with it.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Will it be done on inherited property because that would mean a double tax on top of IHT?
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
Care to point out some bloat at your local hospital....
Because I bet what for you is a unnecessary member of staff is someone else's essential specialist...
NHS is a well known money pit , no matter what you throw at it they can waste more. Cackhanded running of closing down local facilities etc and mucking up GP's etc. Shambles they could do much more with decent local centres taking away all the minor stuff. The trusts could not run a bath
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
Those "infrastructure projects" had no funding and no prospect of funding under previous and current revenue assumptions. That's why they hadn't gone anywhere under the previous government. Infrastructure projects haven't been cancelled to pay for current spending because, simply, they weren't real. All Reeves has done here is drop the fiction.
The A303 (Stonehenge) and A27 projects weren't fiction, just highly contentious...
Reacting to the announcement, a spokesperson for Walberton Parish Council, said: "The Government's decision regarding the A27 bypass is an extremely welcome one for the villages of Walberton, Binsted and Fontwell, which were all adversely affected by the proposed Grey route.
"The route was the longest, most expensive, most environmentally disruptive route of all options presented and, whilst we recognise the need to solve the A27 problem at Crossbush, we hope that the government will now consider cheaper, more sensible and more sustainable solutions."
Now that may be a few people but it carries as much weight as the A303 in the story...
Thanks for the reply - very helpful. I use a27 a lot and traffic very bad round there. Seems like pretty standard nimby stuff to me I'm afraid.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
They already have scaled Euston back, a few years ago. The HS2 part is to have fewer platforms than the 11 originally planned - perhaps as few as six or seven. Something experts said was just about doable given the planned frequency of services from Birmingham, but gave no room for delays or operational issues.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
They already have scaled Euston back, a few years ago. The HS2 part is to have fewer platforms than the 11 originally planned - perhaps as few as six or seven. Something experts said was just about doable given the planned frequency of services from Birmingham, but gave no room for delays or operational issues.
The only benefit of the scale back was a bit more space for an office block - the original 11 platforms is essential for the long term viability of the project (insert additional bits here).
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
I suspect a lot of people actually qualify for pension credit and don't currently receive it...
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
The way to solve "Labour's taxing problem" is to reduce current public expenditure. They won't do that, so it should be rephrased "Labour's spending problem"
While I agree the deficit needs to be reduced, we get the classic Tory response of "cut spending".
Ok, where? Let's cut defence perhaps - do we really get value from the £66 billion we spend in that area? I suspect not but I also suspect no one is seriously going to consider it in the current climate so what areas of non-statutory spending would you cut?
The conservative coalition's austerity is what has given us record high taxes and collapsing public services. Turns out it's cheaper to maintain things properly.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
US has CGT on primary residence I think.
Agree though that this isn't the way to address the problem.
Scrap stamp duty. Land value tax if you're bold and think you can explain it to the public.
Failing that, just make stamp duty an annual cost (e.g. 0.2% of property value) which can be deferred until sale of house.
As noted in the last thread, Jeremy Hunt has written to the Cabinet Secretary about the differences between the numbers the last government signed off on, and those presented by Rachel Reeves yesterday.
Following statements made in the House, I have written to the Cabinet Secretary on the concerning contradiction between the Main Estimates put before Parliament last week and the document presented by the Chancellor today. https://x.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/.
Tweet includes letter to Cabinet Secretary.
In that letter Hunt implies civil servants may be at fault with their reporting because he can't stack up the argument there is no gap, as Reeves claims. The point @RochdalePioneers made above.
Mildly hilarious he sent that letter to Simon Chase given his non grata status in the new government.
That is not what he is saying. The estimates signed off and presented by the government last week do not show the gap from which he is inferring that there isn't one. Any "gap" comes from the spending decisions of the new government. Reeves is also complaining that the contingency fund has been spent. Well, that's what it is for. Its purpose is not to sit around in some sort of cookie jar so the new government can indulge their pet projects.
So you are saying that the gap comes from the pay announcements which Hunt seems to be implying.
Call me cynical but those pay review committees usually report in mid to late May at about the time a general election was called in a massive hurry at no notice...
Sure, as I said in my other posts the reality was that this was a bill that was coming that the government was pretending it would not on the basis that they were not committed to meet the reviews. But the price of not doing so in the past has been constant warfare in the public sector, significantly reduced productivity, poorer retention and ever increasing queues for everything. It is understandable that the new government wants to get on a better footing with their employees but it is still their choice.
The other point that Reeves has is that there have been promises to properly compensate the victims of the blood scandal and the Post Office but no money has actually been put aside to do that and the contingency fund has been spent already.
The real story, of course, is that UK general government gross debt was £2,720.8 billion at the end of Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2023, equivalent to 101.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) and UK general government deficit (or net borrowing) was £40.8 billion in Quarter 4 2023, equivalent to 6.0% of GDP. Or, as it was once put, there is no money left so the spending promises Labour made during the election, modest though they were, cannot be met.
The way to solve "Labour's taxing problem" is to reduce current public expenditure. They won't do that, so it should be rephrased "Labour's spending problem"
While I agree the deficit needs to be reduced, we get the classic Tory response of "cut spending".
Ok, where? Let's cut defence perhaps - do we really get value from the £66 billion we spend in that area? I suspect not but I also suspect no one is seriously going to consider it in the current climate so what areas of non-statutory spending would you cut?
The conservative coalition's austerity is what has given us record high taxes and collapsing public services. Turns out it's cheaper to maintain things properly.
The problem in 2010 was the public finances were in a disastrous state. The GFC basically caused a brief but sharp collapse in receipts and with spending continuing, the deficit gap opened up sharply which couldonly be covered by borrowing.
The incoming Coalition Government created too many "off limits" areas such as the NHS and Education - the pain fell disproportionately in other areas and inefficiencies in the off limits areas persisted. Osborne's mantra was £1 of tax rises to £5 of spending cuts (to which unfortunately the Orange Bookers agreed).
I don't know why some individuals on here praise George Osborne to the skies - he was a poor Chancellor aided and abetted by Danny Alexander who was out of his depth.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
IIRC the Tories last offer to the junior doctors was 11%. Reeves has settled at 22%. That’s a choice.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
I doubt if there'll be a mass cull of elderly benefits, but more means testing would make sense. After all, better off old people are those most likely to stick with right wing parties, so if it comes to a choice between penalising struggling, badly paid workers or oldies with fat occupational pensions and big houses, you're better off soaking the latter. It's sensible politics from Reeves.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
I suspect a lot of people actually qualify for pension credit and don't currently receive it...
No one who has a full (new) state pension or an old one with a tiny or larger occupational state pension will receive it.
Nor will many people with savings. Any savings over £10k count as £1 a week income per £500 (ie assumed interest rate of >10%)
Ironically, the lifetime benefits recipient brigade won't get it because tbeir NI credits give them a full new pension and take them over the threshold.
I can't believe that Labour have kicked off by making another cliff edge worse.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
I suspect a lot of people actually qualify for pension credit and don't currently receive it...
The implied value of it looks to be enormous with all those discounts and freebies.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
They already have scaled Euston back, a few years ago. The HS2 part is to have fewer platforms than the 11 originally planned - perhaps as few as six or seven. Something experts said was just about doable given the planned frequency of services from Birmingham, but gave no room for delays or operational issues.
The only benefit of the scale back was a bit more space for an office block - the original 11 platforms is essential for the long term viability of the project (insert additional bits here).
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than an Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
The government needs to make its own decision. Public spending on pay is a huge part of the budget - you shouldn’t just outsource that to a third party. They can gather evidence and make an assessment, sure, but the government owns the decision
My prompt: Please write for me a typical trade union boss name
ChatGPT: A typical trade union boss name might be "John O'Reilly."
You: "What is a typical UVF name?:
AI:A typical UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) name often reflects a strong connection to Northern Irish culture and history. Names might include traditional Irish or Scottish surnames, or names that carry a sense of heritage or loyalty. Examples could be names like "Liam," "Sean," or "Ronan" for first names, and surnames like "McAllister," "O'Neill," or "Henderson."
And
You: Does the union jack fly on dublin castle.
AI:Yes, the Union Jack does fly at Dublin Castle, but it is typically only displayed on certain occasions, such as state visits or events involving the British royal family. Dublin Castle has a rich history and has served various roles over the years, so the flag's presence can vary depending on the context. If you're interested in more details about the castle or its history, feel free to ask!
Shurely shome mishtake?
On such foundations lies arguably the biggest and narrowest bubble in US stock market history
Still having AI that is on a par with the typical Tory Northern Ireland Cabinet Secretary is a good start.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please tell us how big the NHS workforce should be.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
I really hope it can go ahead on the alternate dates, and that it does not become a duathlon, as that would be unfair on the strong swimmers.
I thought you were a triathlete so why ha ha ha? I am a MTBer and I would have been gutted not to have yesterday's race
It's odd that the alternative is run bike run, why not have the swim in a swimming pool (shortened course/late at night if availablity is a problem)?
Surely, if needed, the solution is to just hold the triathlon somewhere else entirely? The must be other suitable sites in France. Close roads/waterways - whatever - it's the effing Olympics. Better than losing part of it.
(I also thought swimming pool - apart from venue congestion and likely issues of distance before they could then hop on a bike - I'd guess the triathletes might not be well versed in the direction change at the end of the pool or, if some are, that could distort it somewhat)
I really hope it can go ahead on the alternate dates, and that it does not become a duathlon, as that would be unfair on the strong swimmers.
I thought you were a triathlete so why ha ha ha? I am a MTBer and I would have been gutted not to have yesterday's race
It's odd that the alternative is run bike run, why not have the swim in a swimming pool (shortened course/late at night if availablity is a problem)?
I am a triathlete (I've done one, at least, and another hopefully soon).
I'm laughing because Paris tried to clean up the river on the cheap. It was a gamble, but it was not doing the job properly. This was pointed out in civ eng circles a couple of years ago. They've been unlucky that there's been heavy rain, but they took that risk. Note that the 'solution' put in place for the games cost a billion euros, yet appears not to work very well. Remember, this is happening in summer, when rainfall is relatively low, yet the system has been overrun.
It's a shit solution to shit.
The options are to run the mens' swim after the women's tomorrow; run them both on an alternate date in a few days; or do a duathlon. There was talk about swimming on another river (the Meuse?) , but I presume that will be logistically difficult, as the bike and run courses would need to be nearby, even with split transitions - and then there's all the broadcasting stuff as well.
I don't know why they couldn't do it in a pool: I assume an access problem to a 50-metre pool, and the same problem with the bike and run courses needing to be nearby.
But there must be an established triathlon course somewhere near Paris? Surely doing it in the Seine is just for show? I don't know much about triathlons, but they seem to be ten a penny in this country. Surely an alternative non-shit-strewn course can be found?
There are loads of triathlons in France - they have some good athletes, including the current Ironman world champion (Sam Laidlow, who, as his name suggests, is actually British...)
My *guess* is that moving the triathlon introduces a host of issues, including security, broadcasting, accommodation and everything else.
Also, the athletes will have been training for this particular course - and indeed, the athletes will have been selected by their countries specifically for this course. If the new course is significantly different, say hillier or faster, then it could be seen as being unfair. Though that might make it interesting - don't tell the athletes the course until the morning of the event.
Or even turn it into an orienteering event.
On one of my many cycling trips in France we found ourselves in the middle of a triathlon cycling down a riverbank with loads of runners. We turned inland to find ourselves entering a crowded area that was all barriered off. It was the bike change over area. Somewhat embarrassed we got off our bikes and a barrier was moved and the crowd moved back so we could get off the course without entering the changing area. Goodness knows what they thought of us because our bikes and gear were clearly not appropriate, in particular having panniers, nor our physique (old codgers) and we were going in the wrong direction in the running section. Other than that we were a perfect fit.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
Its a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
Its a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Yeah, fair point. In all honesty, I'd do Crewe-Birmingham first - not least because it's clearly easiest to do and solves some existing problems. Do you get the most bang for your buck there? Dunno. But it's the lowest hanging fruit.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
There needs to be rollover relief with CGT on primary residences otherwise why would anyone ever downsize? Additionally if you are taxing houses on the way out you need to reduce stamp duty on the way in otherwise it’s a double hit.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
That's the key point. If the government are going to ignore pay boards when they give advice they don't like then how can they expect employees and unions to abide by recommendations they don't like? The award they came up with is hardly outlandish and to compare it to the 1970s is ludicrous.
To equate it is ludicrous. Comparing it doesn't necessarily imply equivalence. (PB pedantry)
Do we have any engineers who know whether the UK grid is doing any of this ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission ...Some utilities have embraced reconductoring to handle the increase in electricity production. Reconductoring is the replacement-in-place of existing transmission lines with higher-capacity lines. Adding transmission lines is difficult due to cost, permit intervals, and local opposition. Reconductoring has the potential to double the amount of electricity that can travel across a transmission line.[33] A 2024 report found the United States behind countries like Belgium and the Netherlands in adoption of this technique to accommodate electrification and renewable energy. [34] In April 2022, the Biden Administration streamlined environmental reviews for such projects, and in May 2022 announced competitive grants for them funded by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.[35]
The rate of transmission expansion needs to double to support ongoing electrification and reach emission reduction targets. As of 2022, more than 10,000 power plant and energy storage projects were awaiting permission to connect to the US grid — 95% were zero-carbon resources. New power lines can take 10 years to plan, permit, and build.[33]
Traditional power lines use a steel core surrounded by aluminum strands (Aluminium-conductor steel-reinforced cable). Replacing the steel with a lighter, stronger composite material such as carbon fiber (ACCC conductor) allows lines to operate at higher temperatures, with less sag, and doubled transmission capacity. Lowering line sag at high temperatures can prevent wildfires from starting when power lines touch dry vegetation.[34] Although advanced lines can cost 2-4x more than steel, total reconductoring costs are less than half of a new line, given savings in time, land acquisition, permitting, and construction.[33]
A reconductoring project in southeastern Texas upgraded 240 miles of transmission lines at a cost of $900,000 per mile, versus a 3,600-mile greenfield project that averaged $1.9 million per mile...
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
Care to point out some bloat at your local hospital....
Because I bet what for you is a unnecessary member of staff is someone else's essential specialist...
NHS is a well known money pit , no matter what you throw at it they can waste more. Cackhanded running of closing down local facilities etc and mucking up GP's etc. Shambles they could do much more with decent local centres taking away all the minor stuff. The trusts could not run a bath
However much money is hosed at rNHS it still wants more and more.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
They already have scaled Euston back, a few years ago. The HS2 part is to have fewer platforms than the 11 originally planned - perhaps as few as six or seven. Something experts said was just about doable given the planned frequency of services from Birmingham, but gave no room for delays or operational issues.
The only benefit of the scale back was a bit more space for an office block - the original 11 platforms is essential for the long term viability of the project (insert additional bits here).
That can be demolished I guess but what a waste.
The office block hasn't been built yet - it was introduced because the Tories wanted the project to pay it's own way (it won't).
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
Care to point out some bloat at your local hospital....
Because I bet what for you is a unnecessary member of staff is someone else's essential specialist...
NHS is a well known money pit , no matter what you throw at it they can waste more. Cackhanded running of closing down local facilities etc and mucking up GP's etc. Shambles they could do much more with decent local centres taking away all the minor stuff. The trusts could not run a bath
However much money is hosed at rNHS it still wants more and more.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
If CGT at any percent is a complete clog on mobility, then CGT on other investments at 40% (especially without the return of indexation or taper relief) will be a complete clog on investment activity.
Investment is taxed differently to earned income, due to the level of risk. If I invest 100k into a mate's emu farm, there's a better than 50/50 chance I'll lose all my money. Hence it's something I might be cautious about. If the emu farm is super profitable and I end up making 100k, that reduces to 80k under the current taxation regime. At 40%, that reduces to 60k. But with a possibility of losing the full 100k initial investment. Hence a 40% tax _significantly_ alters the risk/reward and expected value calculation of investing, and investment activity will decrease as a consequence. People on a betting site should understand this.
I really hope it can go ahead on the alternate dates, and that it does not become a duathlon, as that would be unfair on the strong swimmers.
I thought you were a triathlete so why ha ha ha? I am a MTBer and I would have been gutted not to have yesterday's race
It's odd that the alternative is run bike run, why not have the swim in a swimming pool (shortened course/late at night if availablity is a problem)?
I am a triathlete (I've done one, at least, and another hopefully soon).
I'm laughing because Paris tried to clean up the river on the cheap. It was a gamble, but it was not doing the job properly. This was pointed out in civ eng circles a couple of years ago. They've been unlucky that there's been heavy rain, but they took that risk. Note that the 'solution' put in place for the games cost a billion euros, yet appears not to work very well. Remember, this is happening in summer, when rainfall is relatively low, yet the system has been overrun.
It's a shit solution to shit.
The options are to run the mens' swim after the women's tomorrow; run them both on an alternate date in a few days; or do a duathlon. There was talk about swimming on another river (the Meuse?) , but I presume that will be logistically difficult, as the bike and run courses would need to be nearby, even with split transitions - and then there's all the broadcasting stuff as well.
I don't know why they couldn't do it in a pool: I assume an access problem to a 50-metre pool, and the same problem with the bike and run courses needing to be nearby.
But there must be an established triathlon course somewhere near Paris? Surely doing it in the Seine is just for show? I don't know much about triathlons, but they seem to be ten a penny in this country. Surely an alternative non-shit-strewn course can be found?
There are loads of triathlons in France - they have some good athletes, including the current Ironman world champion (Sam Laidlow, who, as his name suggests, is actually British...)
My *guess* is that moving the triathlon introduces a host of issues, including security, broadcasting, accommodation and everything else.
Also, the athletes will have been training for this particular course - and indeed, the athletes will have been selected by their countries specifically for this course. If the new course is significantly different, say hillier or faster, then it could be seen as being unfair. Though that might make it interesting - don't tell the athletes the course until the morning of the event.
Or even turn it into an orienteering event.
On one of my many cycling trips in France we found ourselves in the middle of a triathlon cycling down a riverbank with loads of runners. We turned inland to find ourselves entering a crowded area that was all barriered off. It was the bike change over area. Somewhat embarrassed we got off our bikes and a barrier was moved and the crowd moved back so we could get off the course without entering the changing area. Goodness knows what they thought of us because our bikes and gear were clearly not appropriate, in particular having panniers, nor our physique (old codgers) and we were going in the wrong direction in the running section. Other than that we were a perfect fit.
There was a fair size road race near us (but not closed roads) and the kids, along with some others down the street, watched some of it from the front garden. They were cheering/clapping as the cyclists went past. Then an old guy went past on a sit-up-and-beg with a front basket full of shopping - and also got cheered. He seemed to enjoy it, was waving to the spectators down the street and having a good laugh. My daughter did ask why he was so slow.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Only so many can go private, if NHS did not use agencies then the people would have to slink back to NHS and get a job. It only works because NHS are useless and happy to pay a fortune for someone who is next to useless as they have no clue how the place works.
Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
The party of labour, on the side of working people.
CGT at 40% would also massively hit the self employed entrepreneur, developers and investors
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please tell us how big the NHS workforce should be.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
The full new State Pension is £221.20. Pension credit tops up income to a max of £218.15 so the difference is about £160.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
If you get Pension Credit you can also get other help, such as:
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
I suspect a lot of people actually qualify for pension credit and don't currently receive it...
Reeves said yesterday she was making a big push to inform people about their rights
Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
I think the winter fuel allowance will cut through. I mentioned yesterday that was a political choice, and it may be a hit Labour can afford to take at the moment, but if leaves them a hostage to fortune with “cold winter and I can’t eat/heat” stories.
Given the Tories are probably still going to be working out what the heck they stand for and Labour will be constantly painting them as the baddies here, not sure who the beneficiary will be. LDs or Reform I guess.
Some would go to the Tories as main opposition, especially disillusioned pensioners and over 55s who voted Tory since Blair until Starmer but any going LD or Reform if it reduces the Labour voteshare also benefits the Tories under FPTP
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
I'm more concerned that Euston will be scaled back with insufficient platforms for when the bit to Crewe and other bits do materialise.
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
They already have scaled Euston back, a few years ago. The HS2 part is to have fewer platforms than the 11 originally planned - perhaps as few as six or seven. Something experts said was just about doable given the planned frequency of services from Birmingham, but gave no room for delays or operational issues.
The only benefit of the scale back was a bit more space for an office block - the original 11 platforms is essential for the long term viability of the project (insert additional bits here).
That can be demolished I guess but what a waste.
The office block hasn't been built yet - it was introduced because the Tories wanted the project to pay it's own way (it won't).
Mel Stride has been backed this morning but remains the outsider of six. His price has more than halved to 14/1 in a thin Betfair market.
Probably a good way to lose the other half of their votes next election. fwiw I think Jenrick would be the best choice.
Jenrick I personally don't like at all, but you could be right.
This is one contest in which I have a genuinely open-mind.
As an outsider who'd like to be able to vote Con, my preference is Cleverly. Kemi might be brilliant, or she might be seriously disappointing. Tom Tug would be ok.
Certainly Labour seem to be targeting mainly Tory leaning pensioners and over 55s initially with the end of the winter fuel allowance for most and no social care cap. Though more to come with a 40% top rate of capital gains tax rumoured by the autumn the polls may well have narrowed
The party of labour, on the side of working people.
CGT at 40% would also massively hit the self employed entrepreneur, developers and investors
Didn't stop Nigel Lawson doing it
Also, bloody hell. CTT (roughly = IHT) top rate 75% until he reduced it, and there was once an investment income surcharge.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects. While very long term, there’s a theoretical uplift to road space efficiency (potentially shorter stopping distances), in reality I suspect we’ll see massive demand increases for road use with this tech. For one thing, the vast army of the elderly who currently only drive when they absolutely must, will be freed up to get out and about much more easily. Ditto anyone wanting a point to point journey but currently put off by unavailability of parking at their destination.
It’s a shame we have such near sighted people running things, who aren’t actively planning our national infrastructure for future population sizes and likely technology / social trends.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please tell us how big the NHS workforce should be.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
Hardly a 'massive shortage' in an organisation that is continually recruiting as its present workforce retires, relocates and dies.
Those vacancies would have been filled within a few weeks and months while different vacancies would have been created and filled since and yet more vacancies exist currently and will be filled in the near future.
The NHS workforce has increased by over 300k during the last the last five years:
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Mel Stride has been backed this morning but remains the outsider of six. His price has more than halved to 14/1 in a thin Betfair market.
Probably a good way to lose the other half of their votes next election. fwiw I think Jenrick would be the best choice.
Jenrick painting over murals risks reigniting the nasty party charge. Jenrick's Covid housing crisis and Desmond dealings raise questions around his personal integrity.
It is not my choice, and I've left that market as it looks too hard to call.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
If doctors and nurses went private they'd all earn a lot more and we would have to pay for it.
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please tell us how big the NHS workforce should be.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
Hardly a 'massive shortage' in an organisation that is continually recruiting as its present workforce retires, relocates and dies.
Those vacancies would have been filled within a few weeks and months while different vacancies would have been created and filled since and yet more vacancies exist currently and will be filled in the near future.
The NHS workforce has increased by over 300k during the last the last five years:
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
On the whole 'public sector pay rises are Labour's choice' thing which has been the theme of the last day or so, are Tories (led by the Shadow Chancellor) arguing that a Conservative government would have awarded no pay rise at all ?
That's the logic of the fiscal arguments they've been making.
Why does it have to be black white ? They would have awarded some, just not the gangbuster amounts Reeves has awarded.
And now she has opened the payrise gates the flood of demands will follow.
I didnt think I would have to live through the 1970s again
Let's be clear - the payrises are the ones recommended by independent pay review committees. So your argument is that the Tory Government would have tried to get away with paying less.
As I said when the election was called Rishi knew from now on all the news would be bad so he went for a July rather than a Autumn election. Could it be that the payrises (which are obviously large) was one of those bad bits of news only he and Hunt were aware of...
If governments are just going to ignore independent public sector payboards (into which they put their own case) then why not abolish them entirely and go back to collective bargaining and public sector industrial action?
Part of the deal to have no industrial action is for the payboards to come up with a reasonable figure.
If private companies had to pay out that kind of cash they would be cutting the bloated workforce by 20%, never happens in public sector as it comes from the money tree.
https://www.miphealth.org.uk/home/news-campaigns/Features/opinion-restell-nhse-job-cuts.aspx from July 2022: "Thursday’s announcement on the future size of NHS England after its merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England went largely unnoticed as Boris Johnson resigned on the same day. The board has indicated that by April 2024 the newly merged body will be 30–40% smaller than the current combined workforce."
The Russian pilot Fighterbomber reveals that Russia is now recruiting military airfield personnel into assault units. According to him, Russia has created a motorized rifle regiment of the Aerospace Forces - the video shows the training of this unit. There is even a pilot in this regiment, apparently.
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
I wonder how many men there are in the Russian army still defending all its other borders? I have a mental image of some comedy sketch from the 1970s where the fort is defended by one fella and a lot of cardboard cut-outs attached in a row to his shoulders.
Which borders, ex Ukraine facing does Russia need to defend. NATO isn't going to invade any time soon, they're on good relations with North Korea and China (Good enough at any rate with China). The SW borders (Georgia and the stans) are probably where I'd have the actual men and equipment ex Ukraine if I was Putin.
On capital project cuts to make way for current spending increases… it is extraordinary how easily the road network on the south east seizes up on a moderately sunny day, as more people venture out the house. Even if not delayed further, I expect the lower Thames crossing will be at capacity upon opening.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects.
No it won't - it's a 99.999% problem which is why most companies have scaled back on their investments because it isn't working out how the investors hoped.
Time will show that you have got this wrong but no point arguing over it
Comments
AI:A typical UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) name often reflects a strong connection to Northern Irish culture and history. Names might include traditional Irish or Scottish surnames, or names that carry a sense of heritage or loyalty. Examples could be names like "Liam," "Sean," or "Ronan" for first names, and surnames like "McAllister," "O'Neill," or "Henderson."
And
You:
Does the union jack fly on dublin castle.
AI:Yes, the Union Jack does fly at Dublin Castle, but it is typically only displayed on certain occasions, such as state visits or events involving the British royal family. Dublin Castle has a rich history and has served various roles over the years, so the flag's presence can vary depending on the context. If you're interested in more details about the castle or its history, feel free to ask!
Shurely shome mishtake?
On such foundations lies arguably the biggest and narrowest bubble in US stock market history
Would have been properly underway by now but for yet another vexatious court appeal.
Given the Tories are probably still going to be working out what the heck they stand for and Labour will be constantly painting them as the baddies here, not sure who the beneficiary will be. LDs or Reform I guess.
However I think people will accept it short term, after that Labour will be owning any decisions they make.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Ans: A bubble is a bull market in which the speaker does not have a longstanding long position.
So it's sometimes right.
I've had more than 22.5% over that timescale as have large sections of the workforce.
Which is why the election was announced so suddenly when the pay review recommendations appeared in mid to late May.
I'm starting to think Hunt really deserves the rhyming version of his name.
This means someone living on the New State Pension is going to be about £40/90/140 worse off than someone on Pension Credit when they lose the £200/ £250/ £300 winter fuel payment. This is without all the other benefits that those on Pension Credit receive.
Because I bet what for you is a unnecessary member of staff is someone else's essential specialist...
My *guess* is that moving the triathlon introduces a host of issues, including security, broadcasting, accommodation and everything else.
Also, the athletes will have been training for this particular course - and indeed, the athletes will have been selected by their countries specifically for this course. If the new course is significantly different, say hillier or faster, then it could be seen as being unfair. Though that might make it interesting - don't tell the athletes the course until the morning of the event.
Or even turn it into an orienteering event.
Ok, where? Let's cut defence perhaps - do we really get value from the £66 billion we spend in that area? I suspect not but I also suspect no one is seriously going to consider it in the current climate so what areas of non-statutory spending would you cut?
When they go badly they will always blame someone or something else.
And the press is mostly spineless and clueless enough to let them get away with it.
If so that's going to be a noticeable drop for ten million oldies for what will be little actual saving for Reeves.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
Scaling back Euston would be scorched earth stupidity.
I use a27 a lot and traffic very bad round there. Seems like pretty standard nimby stuff to me I'm afraid.
Housing Benefit if you rent the property you live in
Cost of Living Payments
Support for Mortgage Interest if you own the property you live in
a Council Tax discount
a free TV licence if you’re aged 75 or over
help with NHS dental treatment, glasses and transport costs for hospital appointments, if you get a certain type of Pension Credit
help with your heating costs through the Warm Home Discount Scheme
a discount on the Royal Mail redirection service if you’re moving house
There's lots of potential here for ten million oldies to feel victimised by Labour.
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
We have massive staffing shortages already in NHS, ludicrous to think we could cut the workforce further.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So:
a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers?
b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered?
c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Turns out it's cheaper to maintain things properly.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
Agree though that this isn't the way to address the problem.
Scrap stamp duty. Land value tax if you're bold and think you can explain it to the public.
Failing that, just make stamp duty an annual cost (e.g. 0.2% of property value) which can be deferred until sale of house.
The other point that Reeves has is that there have been promises to properly compensate the victims of the blood scandal and the Post Office but no money has actually been put aside to do that and the contingency fund has been spent already.
The real story, of course, is that UK general government gross debt was £2,720.8 billion at the end of Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2023, equivalent to 101.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) and UK general government deficit (or net borrowing) was £40.8 billion in Quarter 4 2023, equivalent to 6.0% of GDP. Or, as it was once put, there is no money left so the spending promises Labour made during the election, modest though they were, cannot be met.
The incoming Coalition Government created too many "off limits" areas such as the NHS and Education - the pain fell disproportionately in other areas and inefficiencies in the off limits areas persisted. Osborne's mantra was £1 of tax rises to £5 of spending cuts (to which unfortunately the Orange Bookers agreed).
I don't know why some individuals on here praise George Osborne to the skies - he was a poor Chancellor aided and abetted by Danny Alexander who was out of his depth.
Nor will many people with savings. Any savings over £10k count as £1 a week income per £500 (ie assumed interest rate of >10%)
Ironically, the lifetime benefits recipient brigade won't get it because tbeir NI credits give them a full new pension and take them over the threshold.
I can't believe that Labour have kicked off by making another cliff edge worse.
That would allow us to calculate what the 'massive staff shortage' is.
(I also thought swimming pool - apart from venue congestion and likely issues of distance before they could then hop on a bike - I'd guess the triathletes might not be well versed in the direction change at the end of the pool or, if some are, that could distort it somewhat)
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
Its a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Comparing it doesn't necessarily imply equivalence.
(PB pedantry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
...Some utilities have embraced reconductoring to handle the increase in electricity production. Reconductoring is the replacement-in-place of existing transmission lines with higher-capacity lines. Adding transmission lines is difficult due to cost, permit intervals, and local opposition. Reconductoring has the potential to double the amount of electricity that can travel across a transmission line.[33] A 2024 report found the United States behind countries like Belgium and the Netherlands in adoption of this technique to accommodate electrification and renewable energy. [34] In April 2022, the Biden Administration streamlined environmental reviews for such projects, and in May 2022 announced competitive grants for them funded by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.[35]
The rate of transmission expansion needs to double to support ongoing electrification and reach emission reduction targets. As of 2022, more than 10,000 power plant and energy storage projects were awaiting permission to connect to the US grid — 95% were zero-carbon resources. New power lines can take 10 years to plan, permit, and build.[33]
Traditional power lines use a steel core surrounded by aluminum strands (Aluminium-conductor steel-reinforced cable). Replacing the steel with a lighter, stronger composite material such as carbon fiber (ACCC conductor) allows lines to operate at higher temperatures, with less sag, and doubled transmission capacity. Lowering line sag at high temperatures can prevent wildfires from starting when power lines touch dry vegetation.[34] Although advanced lines can cost 2-4x more than steel, total reconductoring costs are less than half of a new line, given savings in time, land acquisition, permitting, and construction.[33]
A reconductoring project in southeastern Texas upgraded 240 miles of transmission lines at a cost of $900,000 per mile, versus a 3,600-mile greenfield project that averaged $1.9 million per mile...
Law of diminishing returns.
This is one contest in which I have a genuinely open-mind.
Tom Tug I like, but question if he can lead from the front & cut through.
Investment is taxed differently to earned income, due to the level of risk. If I invest 100k into a mate's emu farm, there's a better than 50/50 chance I'll lose all my money. Hence it's something I might be cautious about. If the emu farm is super profitable and I end up making 100k, that reduces to 80k under the current taxation regime. At 40%, that reduces to 60k. But with a possibility of losing the full 100k initial investment. Hence a 40% tax _significantly_ alters the risk/reward and expected value calculation of investing, and investment activity will decrease as a consequence. People on a betting site should understand this.
There was a fair size road race near us (but not closed roads) and the kids, along with some others down the street, watched some of it from the front garden. They were cheering/clapping as the cyclists went past. Then an old guy went past on a sit-up-and-beg with a front basket full of shopping - and also got cheered. He seemed to enjoy it, was waving to the spectators down the street and having a good laugh. My daughter did ask why he was so slow.
112k vacancies as of march 2023.
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1818194926158454820?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet
Isn't this the sort of thing that happens to air forces which don't have enough operational aircraft ?
What a glorious feeling
I'm happy again
Total bullshit, but very slick...
Kemi might be brilliant, or she might be seriously disappointing.
Tom Tug would be ok.
Also, bloody hell. CTT (roughly = IHT) top rate 75% until he reduced it, and there was once an investment income surcharge.
Autonomous driving will arrive very comfortably within the timelines of any of these major projects. While very long term, there’s a theoretical uplift to road space efficiency (potentially shorter stopping distances), in reality I suspect we’ll see massive demand increases for road use with this tech. For one thing, the vast army of the elderly who currently only drive when they absolutely must, will be freed up to get out and about much more easily. Ditto anyone wanting a point to point journey but currently put off by unavailability of parking at their destination.
It’s a shame we have such near sighted people running things, who aren’t actively planning our national infrastructure for future population sizes and likely technology / social trends.
Hardly a 'massive shortage' in an organisation that is continually recruiting as its present workforce retires, relocates and dies.
Those vacancies would have been filled within a few weeks and months while different vacancies would have been created and filled since and yet more vacancies exist currently and will be filled in the near future.
The NHS workforce has increased by over 300k during the last the last five years:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/publicsectorpersonnel/timeseries/c9lg/pse
It is not my choice, and I've left that market as it looks too hard to call.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
This shortage has been longstanding, we have to go abroad to meet our needs.
We have fewer doctors, gps, nurses per capita than most oecd countries... I think Aus has 40% more nurses for instance.
I do think we could make better use of what we have. NHS management is poor and capital investments have been lacking.
But the idea that we can cut 20% of staff is absurd.
https://www.miphealth.org.uk/home/news-campaigns/Features/opinion-restell-nhse-job-cuts.aspx from July 2022: "Thursday’s announcement on the future size of NHS England after its merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England went largely unnoticed as Boris Johnson resigned on the same day. The board has indicated that by April 2024 the newly merged body will be 30–40% smaller than the current combined workforce."
NI gets a lovely windfall at times that people get a bonus