'France and the UK will support Ukraine for as long as necessary "to thwart Russia's war of aggression", French President Emmanuel Macron and Sir Keir Starmer have said.
The prime minister marked Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris as a guest of Macron on Monday, and held a meeting with his French counterpart to talk about Russia’s invasion and stopping illegal migration in the Channel.
A statement from the Elysee Palace said the two leaders had reaffirmed their commitment to "support Ukraine unwaveringly".
Their meeting comes as questions are being asked about US President-elect Donald Trump's support for Ukraine after he said he could end the war "in one day".
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Even if Ukraine pushed Russia back to 2014, complete and entire, then there would have to a negotiated settlement.
Otherwise the Russians would just continue the war. All wars end in paperwork. Otherwise they don't end.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
Some of the candidates are dangerously religious. Rather than vaguely into cups of weak tea and niceness.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
Its interesting at the enquiry. Arguing against Whitehall checks and balances to expedite compensation payments to remedy a failed commercial IT system which appears to have lacked necessary checks and balances.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
Some of the candidates are dangerously religious. Rather than vaguely into cups of weak tea and niceness.
They aren't especially, they are largely liberal Catholics whereas Welby was a conservative evangelical.
I haven't seen his resignation on any newsite as yet though
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
Some of the candidates are dangerously religious. Rather than vaguely into cups of weak tea and niceness.
They aren't especially, they are largely liberal Catholics whereas Welby was a conservative evangelical.
I haven't seen his resignation on any newsite as yet though
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
To which the response should be - get on with it as otherwise you will be looking at years of stress when we decide to prosecute you but proceed as slowly as you are handing out the current payments...
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
Some of the candidates are dangerously religious. Rather than vaguely into cups of weak tea and niceness.
They aren't especially, they are largely liberal Catholics whereas Welby was a conservative evangelical.
I haven't seen his resignation on any newsite as yet though
Its interesting at the enquiry. Arguing against Whitehall checks and balances to expedite compensation payments to remedy a failed commercial IT system which appears to have lacked necessary checks and balances.
AIUI the system did have checks and balances but the people in the PO chose to hide issues and faults and pursue vendettas against sub-postmasters, mainly because they assumed/thought that they were guilty anyway.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The trouble is, we're already spending a lot more than that on net zero, often on schemes of dubious merit. We've given Ed Miliband 3 years worth of your proposed levy just for the vaporware Carbon Capture stuff. We've spent another years worth over the last 5 years on various grant schemes for heat pumps and home insulation, and it's not even begun to make a dent in the gas space heating market.
And that's before beginning to consider the costs from the electricity price doubling as a result of switching from coal for baseload to a gas/wind mix. (Coal is much cheaper than wind if you remove all the wind subsidies, and the emissions taxes on coal). Or the additional costs from making everyone drive electric cars; the real cost per mile of electric cars is greater than for petrol cars - they are only cheaper because of the tax arbitrage. Drivers are slight winners - the government a massive loser.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
Some of the candidates are dangerously religious. Rather than vaguely into cups of weak tea and niceness.
They aren't especially, they are largely liberal Catholics whereas Welby was a conservative evangelical.
I haven't seen his resignation on any newsite as yet though
I think its a huge part of it. I know people hate Johnson and there are plenty of reasons to. But he can honestly say that he didn't get a chance to implement his vision as everything was overtaken by Covid and then the inflationary shock of the invasion of Ukraine. We've seen on PB how people have tried to say how bad Brexit has been for the UK (I think with some justification, but only to a limited extent). The effects of Covid and the war have been far more impactful. And so yes, being an incumbent when the Covid bill hit and then the inflation ary effects kicked in too was always going to send incumbents out of incumbency.
Not only do the incumbents get the blame for events outside of their control they also get no credit for the interventions. So many times I've heard "the government did nothing to help with my bills" about energy costs, in reality the government spent/borrowed about £51 BILLION for 2022-2023* to subsidise energy and stop the sector and wider economy from keeling over. Every household has had about £2,000 to keep the bills at merely very high levels rather than edging into catastrophic levels. People might argue that the government should have done even more, but everyone who uses energy has had a significant amount of support.
* With another £11 billion or so for 2023-2024.
For the good it did them politically (spoiler: none) they might as well have spent it on the NHS.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely not. Surely British military personnel wouldn't be advocating some kind of negotiated settlement when Barty hasn't reclaimed every inch of Ukraine for the Ukrainians.
Has there been much information on Jewish American voting patterns?
Someone posted some analysis of religious voting patterns. From memory I think of all the religions Jews were the most Democrat in the election. I vaguely recall a majority of Catholics were Republican which was a surprise to me.
I could well have remembered wrong though.
Trump won 82% of white evangelical Protestants, 62% of all Protestants and 58% of Roman Catholics.
If Jews don't control the deep state, and the Dems can't rig the election, how the flip did Trump manage to lose four years ago?
Such questions don't concern the conspiracists.
There's a furious argument ongoing on TwitterX about how Arizona was fixed against Lake for Gallego. It's "completely unknown" for a Senate candidate to poll more than the party's Presidential nominee (as he did, and numerous candidates have, in this and previous elections), apparently.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Of course they do but whisper it on PB and prepare for a broadside from our sadly never were hero community.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It's arseholes all the way down.
I like my fix for the Post Office. Ownership to be given to the SPMs. Complete with the Private Prosecution dept at the Post Office intact. And a PostIt Note saying "Fuck 'em if they can't take their own joke".
Its interesting at the enquiry. Arguing against Whitehall checks and balances to expedite compensation payments to remedy a failed commercial IT system which appears to have lacked necessary checks and balances.
AIUI the system did have checks and balances but the people in the PO chose to hide issues and faults and pursue vendettas against sub-postmasters, mainly because they assumed/thought that they were guilty anyway.
So more s lack of people/process checks and balances. JFDI has its limits.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
Its interesting at the enquiry. Arguing against Whitehall checks and balances to expedite compensation payments to remedy a failed commercial IT system which appears to have lacked necessary checks and balances.
The compensation payments have been decided upon. The enquiries have proven the matter. The convictions are being quashed. All that remains is Aberfan style dickery.
On the subject of the poor benighted management who might feel hurt by this - I want to hurt their feelings. Really, really fucking badly.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely not. Surely British military personnel wouldn't be advocating some kind of negotiated settlement when Barty hasn't reclaimed every inch of Ukraine for the Ukrainians.
Who coulda predicted a Korean type ending. Weird, huh
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Even if Ukraine pushed Russia back to 2014, complete and entire, then there would have to a negotiated settlement.
Otherwise the Russians would just continue the war. All wars end in paperwork. Otherwise they don't end.
Indeed. There were negotiations between the Allies and the Flensburg government at the end of WW2
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Of course they do but whisper it on PB and prepare for a broadside from our sadly never were hero community.
I still think 'chairborne' is the perfect epithet.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Even if Ukraine pushed Russia back to 2014, complete and entire, then there would have to a negotiated settlement.
Otherwise the Russians would just continue the war. All wars end in paperwork. Otherwise they don't end.
Indeed. There were negotiations between the Allies and the Flensburg government at the end of WW2
And with the Japanese after Nagasaki. After the Emperor had to step in to un-deadlock the war council which wanted to continue the war. The response to which was a military coup, which nearly succeeded. In fact it only faded because of a black out caused by another American air raid (conventional).
Even after that comedy, the Japanese were given a piece of paper to sign.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
I haven't seen this on any of my feeds yet, and it's a turnaround from the very recent statement reported in the Standard 3hrs ago- the only difference being the call from the Bishop of Newcastle.
Notes: Welby is right at the end of his term anyway - he has done around 11 years and is nearly 69; normal retirement age is 70 for CofE clergy.
For @HYUFD - when was the last time an ABC resigned early, for a) personal reasons and b) scandal reasons? I can't recall one, but it's not my area really.
I think the last one at York I can recall was ++ David Hope in 2005 at the age of 65, to return to parish ministry and be a vicar again.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
This has the potential to be genuine cross party consensus. Labour has been making very similar noises (as, incidentally did Harris during the campaign).
The days of Brown (and sometimes his successors) brushing aside all cost objections with "the fourth richest country in the world" nonsense, are long gone. Though the attitude survives among the various lobbyists - the £100m for a bat tunnel was a "price worth paying", for example.
It's one of the few ways for government to get the economy heading in the right direction, without having to spray large amounts of money around,
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
It might depend on what circles you move in, and what your interests are. If you are into fell running you will know who Billy Bland and Bob Graham are, if not, then probably not.
Pretty devastating analysis of why Dems lost, focussing on the failure to engage with younger voters:
"The vote shift from blue to red in college towns like Ann Arbor is staggering; in some University of Michigan precincts, the vote shifted 20 points toward Mr. Trump in four years."
"When young women finally made their choice in the campaign’s final weeks, many reluctantly chose their pocketbooks over reproductive rights."
"While Ms. Harris fought valiantly for the 107 days of her campaign, the party’s systematic disconnection from its base’s most urgent moral and economic concerns cost them the election."
What the US election shatters for good is the idea that Demographics are Destiny, or that there is a Coalition of the Ascendant.
The Democrats actually gained ground slightly, with older voters (once assumed to be old bigots who were thankfully dying off), and lost ground among younger voters (once assumed to be virtuous liberals).
Yes that was bollox. People reach for these sweeping takes after 'big' elections. We're seeing it now.
I read somewhere that it was the economic fallout from covid, mainly inflation, that doomed whoever was the incumbent at the following election in any particular nation. Do people agree?
This is my view. I think the Republicans would have won more convincingly with another candidate. I am still shocked though that American voters could look through all of Trump’s past behaviour and vote for him. In other words, I understand why voters wanted the Democrats to lose. Voting for Trump though seems like a dangerous roll of the dice, given what we know of the man. Maybe it will be OK. Maybe it won't.
Whether Trump's tariffs bring back manufacturing jobs to the US or just ramp up inflation further and hit exports will likely decide the 2026 midterms and whether Vance is elected in 2028 or not to succeed his boss as POTUS
Trump's tariff policies are going to be unsuccessful. I think the Republicans are going to over-reach massively in the next two years and pay a heavy price in the midterms. An alternative description of the same forecast is that the Republicans will expect to lose the midterms anyway and will try to ram through everything they can while they have control.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
The government wholly owns the Post Office.
As to the Horizon project - the following describes it perfectly. It was a Proper Plan, by Proper People, with big reports and lots of professionalisation. Reality and actual expertise were not consulted.
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
The practicalities are if Putin gets half of Ukraine it would be no better than having given Hitler half of Poland
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
I dunno- the Church of England might be about to run it close.
The abuse scandal that looks set might be about to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
I haven't seen this on any of my feeds yet, and it's a turnaround from the very recent statement reported in the Standard 3hrs ago- the only difference being the call from the Bishop of Newcastle.
Notes: Welby is right at the end of his term anyway - he has done around 11 years and is nearly 69; normal retirement age is 70 for CofE clergy.
For @HYUFD - when was the last time an ABC resigned early, for a) personal reasons and b) scandal reasons? I can't recall one, but it's not my area really.
I think the last one at York I can recall was ++ David Hope in 2005 at the age of 65, to return to parish ministry and be a vicar again.
Yes, Welby is near retirement age anyway so it wouldn't really be an early resignation
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
I dunno- the Church of England might be about to run it close.
The abuse scandal that looks set to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
Even if Ukraine pushed Russia back to 2014, complete and entire, then there would have to a negotiated settlement.
Otherwise the Russians would just continue the war. All wars end in paperwork. Otherwise they don't end.
Dannatt seems to be taking it as read that Ukraine will be giving up a shitlad of territory, whether up to the current frontlines or a bit extra for VV Putin's demands.
'France and the UK will support Ukraine for as long as necessary "to thwart Russia's war of aggression", French President Emmanuel Macron and Sir Keir Starmer have said.
The prime minister marked Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris as a guest of Macron on Monday, and held a meeting with his French counterpart to talk about Russia’s invasion and stopping illegal migration in the Channel.
A statement from the Elysee Palace said the two leaders had reaffirmed their commitment to "support Ukraine unwaveringly".
Their meeting comes as questions are being asked about US President-elect Donald Trump's support for Ukraine after he said he could end the war "in one day".
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
This has the potential to be genuine cross party consensus. Labour has been making very similar noises (as, incidentally did Harris during the campaign).
The days of Brown (and sometimes his successors) brushing aside all cost objections with "the fourth richest country in the world" nonsense, are long gone. Though the attitude survives among the various lobbyists - the £100m for a bat tunnel was a "price worth paying", for example.
It's one of the few ways for government to get the economy heading in the right direction, without having to spray large amounts of money around,
When you look at the list of rice bowls that the bat tunnel filled, you'll understand why there's about £100 million of resistance to doing away with bat tunnels.
Ob Ref: Diane Feinstein complaining that the Commercial Cargo project by NASA for the space station wasn't generating enough paperwork to keep her staff busy.
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Cheers.
I'd still like to know who the last ABC was who resigned.
AFAICS all of those calling for it, except +Newcastle, are various types of outliers, controversialists and politicos. For example this morning (cf the "Welby Must Go" petition) it was Rev Giles Fraser of St Anne's, Kew, who has been a poke-in-the-eye columnist since the 1990s, when he used to take random potshots at random Evangelicals in his Church Times column.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
If you think NATO will take on Russia without US full support than you have not taken on board the full implications of what has just happened
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
I imagine there is an issue with trying to get Ukraine to the point where it will agree to move from its position of wanting to go back to the 2014 borders and then reparations, prosecutions etc; but it has made little progress for many, many months; and relies largely on US support, which is very unlikely to be replaced. So what other option is there?
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
We know your interest in cricket. Where do you stand on steam trains, Fr Eagles?
(Moving in fairly clergy-heavy circles, it is striking how many are seriously into locomotives powered by gaseous H2O.)
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
I dunno- the Church of England might be about to run it close.
The abuse scandal that looks set to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
In some ways the costs of mitigating climate change are akin to the costs of defending the country from aggression. In both cases, the consequenses of succuss are that life goes on as normal, while the consequences of failure are potentially catastrophic.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
The practicalities are if Putin gets half of Ukraine it would be no better than having given Hitler half of Poland
The practicalities are that wars usually end in negotiation so I've no idea why this one should be different.
I'm not sure how much Zelenskyy will listen to Dannatt, that said.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
I imagine there is an issue with trying to get Ukraine to the point where it will agree to move from its position of wanting to go back to the 2014 borders and then reparations, prosecutions etc; but it has made little progress for many, many months; and relies largely on US support, which is very unlikely to be replaced. So what other option is there?
Not giving Putin the biggest boost for any aggressor in Europe since Hitler took Austria and Czechoslovakia?
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
If you think NATO will take on Russia without US full support than you have not taken on board the full implications of what has just happened
If NATO is not willing to contain Putin because the US has a more isolationist President then it is redundant and if Russian troops are in Warsaw, Talinn, Helsinki and Berlin by the end of the decade we have nobody to blame but ourselves
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
We know your interest in cricket. Where do you stand on steam trains, Fr Eagles?
(Moving in fairly clergy-heavy circles, it is striking how many are seriously into locomotives powered by gaseous H2O.)
Indeed. And What is your view on the Sacred Trinity?
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The trouble is, we're already spending a lot more than that on net zero, often on schemes of dubious merit. We've given Ed Miliband 3 years worth of your proposed levy just for the vaporware Carbon Capture stuff. We've spent another years worth over the last 5 years on various grant schemes for heat pumps and home insulation, and it's not even begun to make a dent in the gas space heating market.
And that's before beginning to consider the costs from the electricity price doubling as a result of switching from coal for baseload to a gas/wind mix. (Coal is much cheaper than wind if you remove all the wind subsidies, and the emissions taxes on coal). Or the additional costs from making everyone drive electric cars; the real cost per mile of electric cars is greater than for petrol cars - they are only cheaper because of the tax arbitrage. Drivers are slight winners - the government a massive loser.
My point was that the amount of money that people said they would be willing to pay was small. The actual amount that could be squeezed out could well be smaller.
I agree on CCS. Heat pumps etc the money could have been better targeted (e.g. mandate them for new houses where they made more sense with the tech at that point, ensuring suitable insulation etc, covering a worked out difference in cost compared to a gas CH install - perhaps given to direct to the first purchaser of such houses). I disagree on coal (you can't ignore the externalities) and electric cars (for those able to home charge off-peak).
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
I dunno- the Church of England might be about to run it close.
The abuse scandal that looks set to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.
To be fair Smyth was never charged or convicted of any criminal offence in his lifetime anymore than Savile or Al Fayed were.
The C of E like the BBC and Harrods were dealing with a different safeguarding era than now when such issues should be flagged earlier
To be fair, it appears that Welby actually lied to the press about his knowledge of the matter. He's not the deepest implicated, but he's the one that carries the can. Allowing him to hang on to retire quietly would be an uncomfortable analogy with how they acted about Smyth.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
Trouble is, I'm not sure there's any evidence whatsoever that these costs would occur under a "business as usual" scenario in the UK.
There's also the problem that the UK on its own is powerless to do anything about it, other than spend loads of money and make us all poor.
If China and the US don't care, and the evidence to date is that they don't, we're just a rounding error in the calculation.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
I imagine there is an issue with trying to get Ukraine to the point where it will agree to move from its position of wanting to go back to the 2014 borders and then reparations, prosecutions etc; but it has made little progress for many, many months; and relies largely on US support, which is very unlikely to be replaced. So what other option is there?
Not giving Putin the biggest boost for any aggressor in Europe since Hitler took Austria and Czechoslovakia?
Would have thought giving most of Eastern Europe including all of Poland to Stalin wasn't a bad boost for an agressor.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
The practicalities are if Putin gets half of Ukraine it would be no better than having given Hitler half of Poland
The practicalities are that wars usually end in negotiation so I've no idea why this one should be different.
I'm not sure how much Zelenskyy will listen to Dannatt, that said.
Wars only end when one side wins or the other side simply gives up because of the bodybags.
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
If you think NATO will take on Russia without US full support than you have not taken on board the full implications of what has just happened
If NATO is not willing to contain Putin because the US has a more isolationist President then it is redundant and if Russian troops are in Warsaw, Talinn, Helsinki and Berlin by the end of the decade we have nobody to blame but ourselves
NATO without Trump support is not going to contain Putin
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
Trouble is, I'm not sure there's any evidence whatsoever that these costs would occur under a "business as usual" scenario in the UK.
There's also the problem that the UK on its own is powerless to do anything about it, other than spend loads of money and make us all poor.
If China and the US don't care, and the evidence to date is that they don't, we're just a rounding error in the calculation.
There is evidence, you may disagree with it, but its absurd to say there is no evidence whatsoever, just because you disagree.
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
With respect to that, it is instructive to read Rory Stewart's book. The section on the way that process is used, combined with obstructionism and outright lies, to prevent things happening that The System does want... In that case it was Rory attempting to end funding of a very dubious "aid" group that had never been vetted.
In the case of the Post Office compensation, I've heard that officials have taken the position of slowing it down at every possible turn. One brief to a minister included, so I've been told, the issue of the well being and stress caused by early payments. That is, "well being and stress" for senior post office related officials who feel that expedited payments would emphasise their guilt.
The Post Office Inquiry does seem to involve an almost endless procession of right arseholes.
It is difficult to imagine an institution in which more could have gone wrong over such a long period of time.
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
I dunno- the Church of England might be about to run it close.
The abuse scandal that looks set to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.
The maths on this one are interesting. £25 million spent on 90 temporary prefabricated houses for refugees/the homeless for a period of 5 years. So that would be £278k each, or £55k per house per year.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
True. In the survey, the costs were expressed in lives lost. Not sure the study leads had access to such estimates and there was a health focus (I was brought in after the study was funded when they realised that the pick a point on a scale approach had issues and needed input on alternatives.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
One problem, in the context of global warming, is with that word "avert".
The best case scenario now is that Britain spends a lot of money to reduce the negative effects of climate change, but then Britain still has to spend a lot* of money adapting to the climate change that still happens. Even a relative success is going to feel a lot like a failure.
* Albeit a lot less than if we did nothing to reduce global warming at all.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
I haven't seen this on any of my feeds yet, and it's a turnaround from the very recent statement reported in the Standard 3hrs ago- the only difference being the call from the Bishop of Newcastle.
Notes: Welby is right at the end of his term anyway - he has done around 11 years and is nearly 69; normal retirement age is 70 for CofE clergy.
For @HYUFD - when was the last time an ABC resigned early, for a) personal reasons and b) scandal reasons? I can't recall one, but it's not my area really.
I think the last one at York I can recall was ++ David Hope in 2005 at the age of 65, to return to parish ministry and be a vicar again.
Yes, Welby is near retirement age anyway so it wouldn't really be an early resignation
I've been seeing bits of online chatter about him resigning because he had done 10 years with his 2022 Lambeth Conference as the usual finale since I think 2023.
But church politics is always dirtier than PB type politics.
Were the ABC to go, I'd expect it first on something like the Thinking Anglicans or Church Times / CEN twitter feed; TA because one of their founders set up the first Archbishop of Canterbury website in 1998 and once Church people are in the loop, they often stay in the loop.
CT/CEN for obvious reasons.
In practice were he to resign, it would imo be after confidential consultation with the House of Bishops.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
If you think NATO will take on Russia without US full support than you have not taken on board the full implications of what has just happened
If NATO is not willing to contain Putin because the US has a more isolationist President then it is redundant and if Russian troops are in Warsaw, Talinn, Helsinki and Berlin by the end of the decade we have nobody to blame but ourselves
NATO without Trump support is not going to contain Putin
We have to, otherwise as I said Russian troops will be marching across Europe. Combined even without the US the other NATO nations have bigger and more effective militaries than Russia's
She's struggling a bit. Bet she'd sooner be facing Starmer at PMQs than Beer in front of Sir NiceOldThing!
Kemi seems to have been on the side of the angels in urging prompt payment of compensation, even if not effective.
Yes, she's doing a good job of dissing Hunt and his team!
I think this all has to be understood in the context of the near certainty that the mess would be handed on for Labour to deal with soon.
Interestingly, Kemi is also contrasting JFDI against full process, as PB was discussing over the weekend in connection with infrastructure projects and bats.
This has the potential to be genuine cross party consensus. Labour has been making very similar noises (as, incidentally did Harris during the campaign).
The days of Brown (and sometimes his successors) brushing aside all cost objections with "the fourth richest country in the world" nonsense, are long gone. Though the attitude survives among the various lobbyists - the £100m for a bat tunnel was a "price worth paying", for example.
It's one of the few ways for government to get the economy heading in the right direction, without having to spray large amounts of money around,
When you look at the list of rice bowls that the bat tunnel filled, you'll understand why there's about £100 million of resistance to doing away with bat tunnels.
Ob Ref: Diane Feinstein complaining that the Commercial Cargo project by NASA for the space station wasn't generating enough paperwork to keep her staff busy.
Clearly.
But the voting public's own rice bowl is sufficiently empty for governments to be rather more assiduous in looking for ways of not doling it out uselessly.
We have a decent mechanism (NICE) to look at cost/benefit when approving healthcare spending. We should try harder with regulation.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Surely this would always have been the case? How would Ukraine 'win'? They would never be strong enough to defeat Russia, certainly with the limitations on weapons use and supply that they have. Russia conceivably could win in the conventional sense but at what cost?
And if you think it through, almost all wars end up in political settlements.
I imagine there is an issue with trying to get Ukraine to the point where it will agree to move from its position of wanting to go back to the 2014 borders and then reparations, prosecutions etc; but it has made little progress for many, many months; and relies largely on US support, which is very unlikely to be replaced. So what other option is there?
Not giving Putin the biggest boost for any aggressor in Europe since Hitler took Austria and Czechoslovakia?
Would have thought giving most of Eastern Europe including all of Poland to Stalin wasn't a bad boost for an agressor.
He had already occupied it, at the time he was an ally to defeat Hitler, as soon as WW2 ended he was the main enemy in the Cold War and NATO was formed to contain him
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
The practicalities are if Putin gets half of Ukraine it would be no better than having given Hitler half of Poland
The practicalities are that wars usually end in negotiation so I've no idea why this one should be different.
I'm not sure how much Zelenskyy will listen to Dannatt, that said.
I would stay there is still a dangerous misapprehension about, thar Russia can be completely defeated.
This is very unlikely, but in that very unlikely event, we would still also face the utter chaos of a disintegrating, and territorialiy enormous, nuclear power, with the same kind of high potential for terrorist proliferation, and acquisition of nuclear weapons, as in the 1990's. I would describe the maximalist position on Russia, which is still currently prevailing in our media and politics, as very inadequately examined.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
Trouble is, I'm not sure there's any evidence whatsoever that these costs would occur under a "business as usual" scenario in the UK.
There's also the problem that the UK on its own is powerless to do anything about it, other than spend loads of money and make us all poor.
If China and the US don't care, and the evidence to date is that they don't, we're just a rounding error in the calculation.
Yes, the models suggest it could be a lot worse. The uncertainty works in both directions.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
True. What would he know about the practicalities of warfare.
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
The practicalities are if Putin gets half of Ukraine it would be no better than having given Hitler half of Poland
The practicalities are that wars usually end in negotiation so I've no idea why this one should be different.
I'm not sure how much Zelenskyy will listen to Dannatt, that said.
the other side simply gives up because of the bodybags.
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
We know your interest in cricket. Where do you stand on steam trains, Fr Eagles?
(Moving in fairly clergy-heavy circles, it is striking how many are seriously into locomotives powered by gaseous H2O.)
Indeed. And What is your view on the Sacred Trinity?
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
I hate tea, I am teetotaller who doesn't drink too.
Bloody hell, the mood music has gone sombre even more quickly than I expected.
Lord Dannatt: there is going to have to be some sort of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
Macron and Starmer have just jointly reiterated their support for Zelensky and Ukraine in Paris, together after the US they lead the strongest militaries in NATO.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
If you think NATO will take on Russia without US full support than you have not taken on board the full implications of what has just happened
If NATO is not willing to contain Putin because the US has a more isolationist President then it is redundant and if Russian troops are in Warsaw, Talinn, Helsinki and Berlin by the end of the decade we have nobody to blame but ourselves
The problem is that what you are fearing could happen anyway even if Russia is defeated in Ukraine. No one knows. There are just too many variables/unknowns.
Probably inevitable once the Bishop of Newcastle called for him to go. She and the Bishops of London and York will now be frontrunners to succeed him, all on the more Catholic wing of the C of E.
2 of them would be the first female Archbishops
I haven't seen this on any of my feeds yet, and it's a turnaround from the very recent statement reported in the Standard 3hrs ago- the only difference being the call from the Bishop of Newcastle.
Notes: Welby is right at the end of his term anyway - he has done around 11 years and is nearly 69; normal retirement age is 70 for CofE clergy.
For @HYUFD - when was the last time an ABC resigned early, for a) personal reasons and b) scandal reasons? I can't recall one, but it's not my area really.
I think the last one at York I can recall was ++ David Hope in 2005 at the age of 65, to return to parish ministry and be a vicar again.
Yes, Welby is near retirement age anyway so it wouldn't really be an early resignation
I've been seeing bits of online chatter about him resigning because he had done 10 years with his 2022 Lambeth Conference as the usual finale since I think 2023.
But church politics is always dirtier than PB type politics.
Were the ABC to go, I'd expect it first on something like the Thinking Anglicans or Church Times / CEN twitter feed; TA because one of their founders set up the first Archbishop of Canterbury website in 1998 and once Church people are in the loop, they often stay in the loop.
CT/CEN for obvious reasons.
In practice were he to resign, it would imo be after confidential consultation with the House of Bishops.
I'd actually say that - +Newcastle having said what she said - there will be some conversation about it at the next House of Bishops meeting.
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
That is uncalled for
To be fair to HYUFD, I'm confident that his comment was meant to be, and indeed was, rather amusing.
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
Now you say it, it is quite possible that @TheScreamingEagles will be appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
I hate tea, I am teetotaller who doesn't drink too.
I would make an excellent Bishop of Bath & Wells.
Be careful what you wish for - Wells stood in for Sandford in Hot Fuzz. Whenever we visit (once or twice a year, although its not that far away) I always enjoy the famous sites!
UPDATE THE ARCHBISHOP HASN’T RESIGNED, WAS GIVEN DUFF INFO
Indeed, I was somewhat surprised an atheist republican from a Muslim family had first hand access to the position of the Archbishop ahead of the BBC and other news networks
That is uncalled for
To be fair to HYUFD, I'm confident that his comment was meant to be, and indeed was, rather amusing.
COP29 is about to start. With demands for money. Of course it does. With Oxfam happily provided a poll showing overwhelming support for taxes on the super rich to raise funds which they will then help to manage.
With the Trumpdozer being elected though all bets are surely off.
"Some countries at COP29, including France, are pushing for innovative financing to help pay for the $1 trillion funding, including taxes on flying and fossil fuel extraction.
A poll published by Oxfam on Monday found that four in five Brits support increasing taxes on luxury transport such as private jets and superyachts to raise funds to tackle climate change.
“The Prime Minister urgently needs to do more to provide support to communities already facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. The money is there,” Chiara Liguori from Oxfam GB said."
I did some stats advice on a study ~ 5 years back that looked at willingness to pay to avert negative effects of climate change in the UK. Showed a mean of £20/month and median of £15/month, I think. Used a referendum type poll - would you pay X/month, where X was assigned randomly to find those values, which is better than e.g. a sliding scale where people gravitate towards the middle (we tested this too and found that we got a mean response near the middle on two different scales with two different middles).
Still a hypothetical, so I wouldn't put too much weight on it, but runs to £7.2 billion per year if you apply only to working population. Or £6.8 billion if you use £20/month/household. That's based on mean, which is the right way to do those sums, but looking at the median, over half the population would be pissed off with such a measure so it could be politically courageous. Making it progressive, so that the mean was £20, but >1/2 paid under £15/month could work. Anyway, some idea of scale, five years out of date. I'm sure many other estimates are available!
The big problem with that approach is you are effectively offering the status quo as an option. It is not, there are costs both ways.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
Trouble is, I'm not sure there's any evidence whatsoever that these costs would occur under a "business as usual" scenario in the UK.
There's also the problem that the UK on its own is powerless to do anything about it, other than spend loads of money and make us all poor.
If China and the US don't care, and the evidence to date is that they don't, we're just a rounding error in the calculation.
There is evidence, you may disagree with it, but its absurd to say there is no evidence whatsoever, just because you disagree.
Sure - climate change costs us 7.4% of GDP by 2100. Seems a plausible estimate. The question is - how much of that is mitigated by a Net Zero target for the UK, rather than say a 50% reduction? How much do we pay for Net Zero vs -50% for the UK. Our efforts are a rounding error on the global impact.
What has died is the cakeism where you can have something for nothing. Whether that was Lawson cutting taxes without doing too much harm to public services, or Brown increasing public spending without increasing tax that much, or Osborne doing a version of austerity that didn't hurt anyone important for quite a while.
To govern is to choose. Lawson said it, even if his choice was to treat family silver as recurring income. But now there is a choice that Labour has made- increase taxes to fund ongoing spending. The Conservatives have hinted at their direction- cut spending to reduce taxes. But until they spell out what that looks like in terms of things, not pounds, it's still a slogan not a choice.
The problem with your statement is that the Tories didn’t cut spending - they talked about cutting spending, pocketed the savings (by reducing taxes) but didn’t actually make the cuts.
The problem with the budget is that it made a bad situation worse by increasing spending by more than the increase in taxes. Given that the world is going to spin into considerable uncertainty and very possibly a recession because of Trump's stupidity that is not a good place to start.
But I agree that both major parties are both refusing to face the realities of dangerously high borrowing and a state that consumes an excessive quantity of the cake, the Tories almost as much as Labour. The fact that the State thinks it is acceptable to produce less and less for more and more is one of the major challenges for any government of any stripe going forward.
Well we are about to see in the US, what happens when there is a considerable actual reduction in state spending.
The difference between the US and UK though, is that the UK is much more efficient at getting the money spent to where it is needed. We may all have many examples of UK gov waste and inefficiency, but in the US it’s a lot worse.
I'd love to see a number for how much of the US Defence Budget goes on waste and corruption (=pork barrels such as "my local airbase").
Comments
The prime minister marked Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris as a guest of Macron on Monday, and held a meeting with his French counterpart to talk about Russia’s invasion and stopping illegal migration in the Channel.
A statement from the Elysee Palace said the two leaders had reaffirmed their commitment to "support Ukraine unwaveringly".
Their meeting comes as questions are being asked about US President-elect Donald Trump's support for Ukraine after he said he could end the war "in one day".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8dz0n8xldo
Otherwise the Russians would just continue the war. All wars end in paperwork. Otherwise they don't end.
https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,scottish-public-service-awards-2024-shortlist-announced?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning Roundup Monday November 11&utm_content=Morning Roundup Monday November 11+CID_b18cf6169a3ac57a73f76f6cb13d5428&utm_source=Email newsletters&utm_term=Scottish Public Service Awards 2024 shortlist announced
I haven't seen his resignation on any newsite as yet though
What other confirmation do you need ?
We've spent another years worth over the last 5 years on various grant schemes for heat pumps and home insulation, and it's not even begun to make a dent in the gas space heating market.
And that's before beginning to consider the costs from the electricity price doubling as a result of switching from coal for baseload to a gas/wind mix. (Coal is much cheaper than wind if you remove all the wind subsidies, and the emissions taxes on coal). Or the additional costs from making everyone drive electric cars; the real cost per mile of electric cars is greater than for petrol cars - they are only cheaper because of the tax arbitrage. Drivers are slight winners - the government a massive loser.
There's a furious argument ongoing on TwitterX about how Arizona was fixed against Lake for Gallego.
It's "completely unknown" for a Senate candidate to poll more than the party's Presidential nominee (as he did, and numerous candidates have, in this and previous elections), apparently.
I like my fix for the Post Office. Ownership to be given to the SPMs. Complete with the Private Prosecution dept at the Post Office intact. And a PostIt Note saying "Fuck 'em if they can't take their own joke".
Our in-house expert, Cyclefree, tends to pinpoint the source as a conversation between Blair and Harman in which they discussed what to do with the PO and how to best get it ready for privatisation and off the Government's hands - a perfectly reasonable objective in itself but one that was to lead to a long succession of inept and catastrophic decisions.
Personally I would go back in time to the decades of organic growth which created a highly diffuse business that would have been difficult to run even with the best of management, and of course the management was a very long way from the best.
It is a truly epic disaster, and one which reflects badly on a very great many people and the way in which they ran its affairs.
On the subject of the poor benighted management who might feel hurt by this - I want to hurt their feelings. Really, really fucking badly.
Dannatt is not even a serving general now
(That said, this is my "if they agree with me they're right; if they disagree, they're wrong" approach.)
https://www.teneues.com/en/authors-photographers/michael-poliza
Even after that comedy, the Japanese were given a piece of paper to sign.
Notes:
Welby is right at the end of his term anyway - he has done around 11 years and is nearly 69; normal retirement age is 70 for CofE clergy.
For @HYUFD - when was the last time an ABC resigned early, for a) personal reasons and b) scandal reasons? I can't recall one, but it's not my area really.
I think the last one at York I can recall was ++ David Hope in 2005 at the age of 65, to return to parish ministry and be a vicar again.
Labour has been making very similar noises (as, incidentally did Harris during the campaign).
The days of Brown (and sometimes his successors) brushing aside all cost objections with "the fourth richest country in the world" nonsense, are long gone.
Though the attitude survives among the various lobbyists - the £100m for a bat tunnel was a "price worth paying", for example.
It's one of the few ways for government to get the economy heading in the right direction, without having to spray large amounts of money around,
"The vote shift from blue to red in college towns like Ann Arbor is staggering; in some University of Michigan precincts, the vote shifted 20 points toward Mr. Trump in four years."
"When young women finally made their choice in the campaign’s final weeks, many reluctantly chose their pocketbooks over reproductive rights."
"While Ms. Harris fought valiantly for the 107 days of her campaign, the party’s systematic disconnection from its base’s most urgent moral and economic concerns cost them the election."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/opinion/kamala-harris-young-voters.html
I would personally say that all-out war between Russia and the West would be much the more sombre, and unwinnable, scenario.
As to the Horizon project - the following describes it perfectly. It was a Proper Plan, by Proper People, with big reports and lots of professionalisation. Reality and actual expertise were not consulted.
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
A more realistic question would be more along the lines of:
If we continue as is climate change will cost Uk households £1,000 a year by 2050 and £2500 by 2100 in addition to damaging the planet and creating global instability. How much extra (or less) should we pay now to reduce those future costs and protect the planet?
The abuse scandal that
looks setmight be about to claim Justin Welby's scalp was known about in 1982. An internal investigation, chaps among chaps, not reported to the police until 2013, because it might show the team in a bad light, dontchaknow.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje0y3gqw1po
ETA: Update on the update. Still not sure how tenable his position is.
And awards are an inexpensive way of spreading good practice.
@TheScreamingEagles what is your position on tea? How strong do you like it?
There is some very flashy clothing involved....
Still, it's probably only a matter of time now.
The C of E like the BBC and Harrods were dealing with a different safeguarding era than now when such issues should be flagged earlier
Ob Ref: Diane Feinstein complaining that the Commercial Cargo project by NASA for the space station wasn't generating enough paperwork to keep her staff busy.
I'd still like to know who the last ABC was who resigned.
AFAICS all of those calling for it, except +Newcastle, are various types of outliers, controversialists and politicos. For example this morning (cf the "Welby Must Go" petition) it was Rev Giles Fraser of St Anne's, Kew, who has been a poke-in-the-eye columnist since the 1990s, when he used to take random potshots at random Evangelicals in his Church Times column.
(Moving in fairly clergy-heavy circles, it is striking how many are seriously into locomotives powered by gaseous H2O.)
I'm not sure how much Zelenskyy will listen to Dannatt, that said.
I agree on CCS. Heat pumps etc the money could have been better targeted (e.g. mandate them for new houses where they made more sense with the tech at that point, ensuring suitable insulation etc, covering a worked out difference in cost compared to a gas CH install - perhaps given to direct to the first purchaser of such houses). I disagree on coal (you can't ignore the externalities) and electric cars (for those able to home charge off-peak).
Allowing him to hang on to retire quietly would be an uncomfortable analogy with how they acted about Smyth.
There's also the problem that the UK on its own is powerless to do anything about it, other than spend loads of money and make us all poor.
If China and the US don't care, and the evidence to date is that they don't, we're just a rounding error in the calculation.
Negotiations are just the follow on.
I mean, do we really want the head of the CoE to be the kind of person who says "I am a Christian" frequently??!???
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/government-climate-policy-economic-impact/#:~:text=It found that “under current,and 7.4% by 2100”.
The maths on this one are interesting. £25 million spent on 90 temporary prefabricated houses for refugees/the homeless for a period of 5 years. So that would be £278k each, or £55k per house per year.
The best case scenario now is that Britain spends a lot of money to reduce the negative effects of climate change, but then Britain still has to spend a lot* of money adapting to the climate change that still happens. Even a relative success is going to feel a lot like a failure.
* Albeit a lot less than if we did nothing to reduce global warming at all.
But church politics is always dirtier than PB type politics.
Were the ABC to go, I'd expect it first on something like the Thinking Anglicans or Church Times / CEN twitter feed; TA because one of their founders set up the first Archbishop of Canterbury website in 1998 and once Church people are in the loop, they often stay in the loop.
CT/CEN for obvious reasons.
In practice were he to resign, it would imo be after confidential consultation with the House of Bishops.
But the voting public's own rice bowl is sufficiently empty for governments to be rather more assiduous in looking for ways of not doling it out uselessly.
We have a decent mechanism (NICE) to look at cost/benefit when approving healthcare spending. We should try harder with regulation.
This is very unlikely, but in that very unlikely event, we would still also face the utter chaos of a disintegrating, and territorialiy enormous, nuclear power, with the same kind of high potential for terrorist proliferation, and acquisition of nuclear weapons, as in the 1990's. I would describe the maximalist position on Russia, which is still currently prevailing in our media and politics, as very inadequately examined.
I would make an excellent Bishop of Bath & Wells.